2024-mastering-salary-cap-drafts-par2024-mastering-salary-cap-drafts-part-2024-mastering-salary-cap-drafts-part-2024-mastering-salary-cap-drafts-part-2024-mastering-salary-cap-drafts-part-t-If you haven’t already, it’s a good idea to go back and read the first three parts of this salary cap draft series before you dive into nomination strategies.

Part 1, Basic Concepts
Part 2, Building Your Skill Set
Part 3, Preparation

The nature of a salary cap draft is that they are unpredictable. There are so many variables you can’t control that it is even more critical to maximize your edges on the things you can control. Nominations are one of those things. Managers in a salary cap draft notoriously give very little thought to who they will nominate and why. If you want to take your salary cap draft skills to the next level, you must become intentional with your nominations and think about what you’re accomplishing with each nomination you make.

Opening Thoughts

As you work through a salary cap draft, you’ll notice that drafters tend to treat nominations as a minor inconvenience or speed bump during the draft. It’s not a conscious thought that they don’t care about who they nominate, but since they’re allowed to bid on anyone, their minds tend to treat nominations as an afterthought. If they can bid on anyone, it doesn’t matter who they put on the block, right?

Wrong!

It matters a lot. Have a reason for every nomination you make. Liking a player isn’t a good enough reason. Contemplate what the nomination does for your team, cap, and pre-planned draft strategy.

Think of it like this: In a typical salary cap draft with 16 roster spots you only have 16 chances to decide who you want to be bidding on at any particular time (that number can vary a little bit, but the point remains the same).  That number of nominations is both small, and powerful. Don’t let yourself blow off one of the few times you have total control over what is about to happen in your salary cap draft.

The draft will take on a personality and a shape as it continues, and your job is to assess what’s happening and make the right nomination for your situation based on a few different factors. You should be watching your cap situation, other managers’ cap situations, your roster, other rosters, and the player pool scarcity both overall and within position groups and tiers. Calling out an ill-timed nomination because you didn’t consider someone’s cap situation can lead to losing a player that you might’ve landed had you played it differently.

Your salary cap draft nominations have the power to force others to react, provide clarity on your attack plan, or steer drafters away from positional runs. For example, you find yourself in a casual salary cap draft league where you can only start one quarterback in your lineup. You had planned to roster two cheap quarterbacks later in the draft, but you realize that managers are inexplicably starting to nominate and roster backup quarterbacks. If you had intended to spend $6-$8 on a couple of guys like Trevor Lawrence, Jared Goff, and Kirk Cousins, you should start to figure out how you can stop this quarterback run, or your plan is in danger. Drafters tend to get nervous about a positional run during a salary cap draft just as they do in serpentine drafts. They’ll see others rostering a backup quarterback and think they should do it, too. You can stop that cold. Go to your Nomination List that you prepared (see Part 3) ahead of time and pick a big shiny object like Malik Nabers to refocus everyone’s attention to another position.

This is an example of the power of a nomination. This is just one example, but your nominations will take on different forms as various situations present themselves while you draft. Here are some ideas about how that will look in the different stages of your salary cap draft.

Early Nominations in a Salary Cap Draft

There is a common salary cap draft myth that you should begin all your drafts by nominating expensive players you don’t want so you can drain cap from other teams. While the logic is fine, in practice this strategy doesn’t work like people think it does.

The first problem with this idea is that in a typical 12-team league with 16-man rosters, there will be $2,400 in cap space to be spent during the draft. Calling out Saquon Barkley (no matter how much you don’t care about having him) and seeing someone spend $42 on him doesn’t appreciably change the available cap remaining. Instead, you’ve taken the first chance you have to make a nomination and wasted it on something with zero impact on the rest of the draft.

Further, when a salary cap draft starts, most of the people in the room are excited to start bidding on the top players. You don’t necessarily need to nominate a top player you don’t want because they’ll be nominated soon anyway. For example, let’s say you are out on Puka Nacua this year. If there are two or three managers (or more, he is a Top 10 wide receiver in ADP after all) in the room that want Nacua then he is going to go for around $40-$45. If you nominate him you are correct in thinking that someone has just spent a big portion of their cap on their top wide receiver and it lowers the competition for future elite pass-catchers.

But on the other hand, if three people are interested in Nacua you are actually tying up $40 in the minds of all three managers who want him. You’ve effectively tied up $120 instead of $40. But when one person lands him, you free up the other two to bid against you for a different wide receiver. Also, ask yourself, “How long is Nacua going to last before he’s nominated by someone else?” Usually, it won’t be long. Managers in a salary cap draft love nominating the top players. So let someone else do it, and then use your nomination for something else.

A better thing to use your nomination for early in a salary cap draft is defining where your draft is headed. If you read Part 3 in this series you have a few par sheets ready to go before the draft. With your first nominations, you should be laser-focused on finding out which par sheet you are using. If you don’t figure out what your strategy is until 30 or 40 players are gone, then you may lose the ability to shift your strategy effectively. For example, let’s say you want a top quarterback, and if you don’t get an elite guy, then you’re going to pivot to a top tight end. If you wait on Josh Allen or other top quarterbacks, you may have to watch Trey McBride and Sam LaPorta go off the board while you wait. By then, it is too late to adjust. Defining your draft quickly is one of the most crucial things you can do early in a salary cap draft. Use your early nominations to try to accomplish that goal and push the draft where you want it to go.

Middle-Stage Nominations in a Salary Cap Draft

Your nomination strategy should change as you head into the middle stages of a salary cap draft. You now have a defined path you’re on and know what plan you are executing. The elite players are usually completely gone, and the real meat of the draft is in front of you. This is where you want to start wasting people’s caps and roster spots. You can now give in to the temptation to nominate players you don’t want, and hopefully, you can also pick out players who have a lot of preseason hype and combine the two. For example, there is considerable optimism for Anthony Richardson this summer after he piled up fantasy points in his short stint under center for Indianapolis last year. But, if you aren’t interested in Richardson then he’s a perfect nomination because he’ll be fairly expensive and you don’t want him anyway.

The middle part of the draft is also the time when you don’t want to be putting your favorite players out there yet. If someone else nominates them, so be it, but during the middle portion of the draft, quite a few teams will start to get a full lineup or get low enough on money that they won’t be bidding on many players. Your job is to simply outlast them. You don’t have to make it any more difficult than that. You should have locked up your core of elite players and as a result, you may have spent more than the other players in the room. At this stage you not only need to get a few mid-tier players, but you also need to have an eye towards setting yourself up to dominate the end of the draft with your cap space.

So, your job at this point is to have patience. When it is your turn, you should nominate players you have little interest in rostering, players you think will go for more than they should, or players you can’t afford. For example, if you already have Amon-Ra St. Brown and Garrett Wilson then you should be trying to nominate the most expensive wide receiver left on the board. Whatever your strategy may be, you have to let the draft come to you, and that sometimes means nominating someone you don’t want for six or eight rounds in a row. Be prepared for that by having your nomination sheets (from Part 3) ready. Try to get some good deals and roster some players, but position yourself so that near the 70%-finished mark, you have the most money and you can dominate the final stage.

Late-Stage Nominations in a Salary Cap Draft

As you get to the end of the draft, your goals shift. Now, instead of just worrying about your cap space, you must also worry about how many roster spots you have left. You have two pieces of finite capital in a salary cap draft, and roster spots are one of them. They become increasingly valuable the further you get towards the end of the draft. It’s also not unusual for leagues to have odd or strict roster limitations that you need to pay attention to. If you are limited to taking six wide receivers, you can’t be caught rostering a $1 receiver as your final player when you have the money to roster an $11 receiver. Nomination strategy in the end game is critical, and it could be argued that at no point in a salary cap draft are nominations more important than during this finishing stage.

Hopefully, you have kept your kicker and defense slots open to this point. Being able to nominate them and effectively punt a nomination is a huge advantage to have when you don’t want to call out certain players you are hoping will fall to you cheaply at the end. But, either way, you need to carefully craft your nominations so that you don’t call out someone you get stuck with and you don’t call out your favorite sleeper too early and you lose him or have to pay too much.

There are a couple of other considerations to be aware of at this stage in the draft. The first is that if you have followed this strategy and are one of the teams with the most money left, a natural rivalry will develop with a few teams that still have cap space with you. An important tool to have in your skillset at this point is what is known as the targeted nomination. You should be examining the rosters of the teams with cap space to compete with you and directly aiming your nominations at them.

Not only do you want to aim nominations at them, but you also want to start trying to fill their roster to take them out of contention for players you want. If you still need your starting tight end and another team needs theirs as well, consider calling out the most hyped tight end sleeper to get them to bite. It might not always work, but this is how you try to control things. At this point, roster slots themselves have value. Start trying to fill your opponents’ rosters with targeted nominations.

One last word about the end stages when salary caps are below $15. You need to be careful who you nominate at this point. Nominating someone you don’t want could mean you’re stuck with that player for $1 because managers are waiting on other guys. You’re going to have to switch back to nominating the guys you want and hoping you get them.

As the end of the draft draws near, most teams will only have enough to bid $1 or $2 for all their players. This is also a critical stage where you want to be one of the teams that can afford to spend $2-$3 instead of just $1. Often at this point, it pays to nominate a player you want for $2 instead of $1 because someone may not want to pay $3, but they’ll pay $2. The downside of nominating for $1 is that if someone does say $2, then you end up paying $3. Losing an extra dollar with a poor opening nomination bid at this point is a mistake and can usually be avoided with careful thought ahead of time.

Conclusion

Nominations are a massive part of any salary cap draft strategy when you want to continue to grow as a drafter. Many of the drafters you go against will have no nomination strategy and will blindly choose the top name on their draft sheet when it is their turn. Now you know that this is a mistake that gives up some control over where your draft goes. Instead of letting the draft happen to you, take charge of your nominations and use them to give yourself an edge. Be deliberate and purposeful with who you nominate, and it will improve your salary cap draft results.

Follow @DrewDavenportFF