Salary Cap Draft Mastery: Part 3, Preparation

Photo: USA Today Sports

The first part of this series focused on some basic concepts you need to know to excel in a salary cap draft, and the second part helped you start to build your salary cap draft skill set. But before you can capitalize on this knowledge, you need to know how to prepare so that when the moment comes, you have the information in front of you to tell you what to do. You must take your preparation for a salary cap draft to another level and realize it is completely different from preparing for serpentine drafts. It requires you to be ready with an opinion on every single player who is nominated because you won’t have time to think it over while other people make their picks. Get prepared ahead of time, and you’ll feel calm and comfortable when bids start flying.

Preparing a Salary Cap Draft Tier Sheet

One of the bigger principles in a salary cap draft is the relationship between player scarcity and prices during the draft. This isn’t referring to scarcity over a full position group. Rather, it refers to scarcity in similarly valued players within a position group. This is one of the biggest drivers of price fluctuation in a salary cap draft. For example, Footballguys has the top five wide receivers in a tier – CeeDee Lamb, Tyreek Hill, Justin Jefferson, Ja’Marr Chase, and Amon-Ra St. Brown. If Lamb, Hill, and Jefferson are already on a roster, the prices for Chase and St. Brown will creep up, and the price of the last one to be nominated will be an order of magnitude higher. That happens because no more elite options are left, so anyone who wants a top wide receiver has to go for that last one, thereby creating artificial competition.

On the other hand, you won’t see that inflation if someone nominates Chris Godwin because he isn’t in the same tier as Chase or St. Brown. So, if you’re going to excel at salary cap drafting, you must master the skill of rostering players before the tiers become scarce. That means having your player rankings broken down into groups of players with similar price points and fantasy value. During your salary cap draft, when the tiers start to run out of players, you must move quickly to roster someone before you are down to the last player in a tier. This can mean nominating someone so you can bid on them or seeing that a player who was just nominated is about to make a tier scarce so that you can go after them. Without tier sheets, you’ll never see this problem developing.

The best way to separate players into salary cap draft tiers is to get a hold of some Average Values, or rankings with salary cap draft values, instead of rankings with Average Draft Position. You’ll notice that at some point, as you go down the list, there are price breaks that are bigger than at other points. You can look at Fooballguys’ Salary Cap Values to see an example. That generally is where you would start with your tiers. Whatever your process may be, finding the natural drop-offs in your rankings is important to separate players into groups with similar prices. For example, this year's top group of quarterbacks is Josh Allen, Jalen Hurts, Lamar Jackson, and Patrick Mahomes II. After those guys, there is a drop-off to the next group that starts with Dak Prescott. Mahomes' price ($21) is $6 more than Prescott's ($15). When you’re drafting and want a top quarterback, it’s better to strike early than be too late. If you see a top quarterback get nominated, then either grab that player or, better yet, nominate the next one in the tier when it’s your turn to nominate, and that’s likely to be your best price. That’s something you have to feel out as you draft, but the important caveat to all of this is something that’s essential to remember: The SIZE of the tiers will impact this entire calculus. In the example with the quarterbacks, the tier only has four players, so scarcity hits quickly and hard. But there are some massive tiers this year at running back, wide receiver, and even tight end. That lowers the urgency for you and allows you to attempt to wait for deals in those tiers.

All of this shows you how imperative it is to break your rankings into tiers before you walk into a salary cap draft room. Then, before you actually go draft, you should go back and erase any mention of prices on your tier sheet. You don’t care about what the prices were predicted to be before your draft. That won’t hold up when the draft starts; it will only paralyze you. When you get into the draft, you only care whether you are happy with the player you got for that spot on your roster. If you are happy with Josh Jacobs as your RB2 and have allotted $21 for that position, it doesn’t matter if his predicted price was $16. Overpaying by $5 is immaterial if you are happy with the player and it fits your price sheet. Getting too hung up on what you should pay for a player can make you rigid and unable to adapt when things don’t happen like you thought they would in the salary cap draft room.

Making a Salary Cap Draft Par Sheet

A par sheet is one of the best tools to execute your pre-draft plan. In a salary cap draft, you want to shoot exactly par for your draft, meaning you want to spend exactly $200. You never want to end up with extra money, and you can’t go over $200, so you have to hit the number perfectly. Using your par sheet during the draft is the way to do that.

To make a par sheet, you should find your league settings and write down every roster spot on a sheet of paper. Then, assign an exact dollar amount to every single position on your roster and make those numbers add up to your salary cap. For example, in a typical league with a $200 cap, you would write down your 16 positions – 10 starters and 6 bench players – and then what you ideally want to spend on each position. For your kicker and defense, you start by assigning them $1, then for a few backups (like your RB5 and WR6), you’ll assign $1 as well. Then, with the remaining money, you should decide your strategy and start weighting and assigning money to the appropriate spots. For example, if you think that you want a deep wide receiver corps and one anchor running back, you would start by assigning what you think you can get those players for in the draft. You might start by writing “45” next to your RB1 and then “50” next to your top wide receiver slot. Then start giving money to the other spots on your roster. You’ll tweak and move the money until you have exact numbers for every spot. This process tells you what you value while you work through it and shows you how critical every dollar is in a salary cap draft.

As an example, your par sheet in this scenario might look something like this:

• QB1 - 7
• RB1 - 45
• RB2 – 14
• WR1 – 50
• WR2 – 27
• WR3 – 16
• TE – 6
• K - 1
• DEF – 1
• FLEX - 13
• Bench – 7
• Bench – 5
• Bench – 4
• Bench – 2
• Bench – 1
• Bench – 1

This is just an example, and there are a lot of different builds you can choose, such as:

• Focusing on a top tight end
• Getting two Top 12 running backs
• Going heavy on wide receivers
• Landing a top quarterback

Move the money around however you like and build a couple of different options for each salary cap draft. Bring two or three par sheets to your draft. Once you land your first few players, you’ll know which sheet will be the one you use, allowing you to throw the others out. As the draft continues, you’ll put the players in the appropriate spots as you roster them and then write a “+” or “-“ out on the right side of your par sheet as you spend. For example, your plan included landing a solid running back, but the top guys were too much for the $45 you allotted and you ended up with Jahmyr Gibbs for $39. Since you saved $6, that means you can write “+6” on your par sheet, and you know you can use that money somewhere else. On the other hand, if you went all out for Breece Hall and paid $51, write “-6” on your sheet, so you know you have to make up $6 somewhere. The benefit of the par sheet Is that you can instantly look down your sheet and figure out where to best take that $6 from. You’ll keep a running total of the entire draft as to how you’re doing in relation to par as things progress. This helps you stay on track and keeps you focused on spending all your money but doing it in a way that fills out your team properly. Par sheets are a massive advantage over your competition.

Salary Cap Draft Nomination Lists

One of the big mistakes a lot of managers make in a salary cap draft is to waste their nominations. This will be fully explained in Part 4 on Nomination Strategies, but as you prepare, all you need to do is make a couple of lists for easy reference during the draft.

As a salary cap draft goes, you will have to bounce back and forth between nominating players you want or finding players to call out that you don’t. This is harder than it sounds in the heat of the moment, especially in online draft rooms. You can’t fall into the bad habit of looking down at your draft sheet and calling out the next ranked player on the list after the previous nomination. In an online draft, you’ll notice quite a few managers nominating the top-ranked player on that particular website software. Or they aren’t prepared and time out looking for the nomination they want. None of this does anything to further their salary cap draft strategy. Instead, make two lists.

List #1 is a list of players you want or are targeting as part of your strategy. List #2 contains players you don’t want or players that don’t further your strategy. What’s important to remember is that these lists are supposed to further your own pre-planned draft strategy from your par sheet. Of course, you’d like to have Josh Allen, but if you decide to go cheap at quarterback, then he shouldn’t be part of your plans. He belongs on List #2 strictly because he doesn’t fit your strategy, not because you don’t like him as a fantasy quarterback.

So, if you want to go cheap at quarterback you will have some inexpensive players at quarterback on List #1 (players you like), and some expensive players at quarterback on List #2 (players that don’t fit your cheap quarterback goal). This year, List 1 would have guys like Jared Goff, Trevor Lawrence, and Brock Purdy. These quarterbacks are going somewhat cheaply this year. Don’t worry if your nomination of one of these guys doesn’t work. If you call out Brock Purdy and suddenly find someone saying “$9” on him, it’s easy, and you’re out. That’s why you have a long list that you can go back to again and again when it is your turn to nominate. One of your cheap List 1 quarterbacks should sneak through to you at some point for a good price. You want to have guys from every position on each list so that when it’s your turn to nominate, you can quickly go to your list and pick out the perfect player to keep pushing towards the goals you set out on your par sheet before the salary cap draft.

You don’t need to put every player on these lists, so keep it limited to those players who best execute your strategy. Putting Bryce Young on List 1 may technically be correct (he’s a cheap quarterback), but if you don’t care about rostering him, he shouldn’t make your nomination list. However, the deeper this list is, the less freelancing you’ll have to do when you’re in the draft.

Having nomination sheets seems like overkill, but finding the perfect nomination isn’t easy. It’s a big key to succeeding in your salary cap draft. You won’t have time during the draft to find the right player to call out when it’s your turn. The nomination sheets help you with that difficult decision in the heat of the moment.

Closing

Preparation for a salary cap draft is a different animal than preparation for a serpentine draft. When you walk into the draft, have your tier sheet, par sheet, and nomination lists. Other than your software, you don’t need anything else. These three lists will make you more prepared than almost any drafter in a salary cap draft out there. The nature of a salary cap draft means that you can’t nail every detail down, but if you have read the first three parts of this series, you have a firm yet flexible way to succeed. Next up is Part Four, which will explain more about the theory behind nominations and how to use them to your benefit.

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