Fantasy football 2014 auction strategies: Setting position budgets

It has probably been a long time since you bowled with bumpers, unless you’ve recently been to a child’s birthday party. You presumably removed the training wheels from your bike years ago. You likely don’t have an instructor with his or her own steering wheel and brake pedal sitting next to you while you drive. So why does your league still use a snake draft? It’s time to upgrade to the auction, the grown-up way to pick a fantasy team.

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The auction is clearly the superior of the roster-filling formats available to the fantasy community. First and foremost, every player in the NFL can be had by any owner in the league at the right price. Are you a huge Chiefs fan? You can ensure you get Jamaal Charles in an auction. Is your strategy dependent on getting LeSean McCoy? Well, I’d tell you it’s silly to lock yourself into a specific player, but, in an auction, you can get McCoy at all costs. If you’re slotted to pick at the end of a draft, you aren’t coming anywhere near Charles, McCoy, or any of the other top running backs.

Secondly, auctions favor the prepared, the studied, the savvy owners who have put their time in over the summer. Anyone can show up at a draft and end up with at least a decent team simply by following a cheat sheet they found on the Internet. That’s not going to work in an auction. Fantasy should be about rewarding the best team. Sure, luck is always going to be part of the equation, but the auction format goes a long way toward minimizing that input.

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Just like its inferior draft cousin, the auction requires a sound, overarching strategy. While your draft slot goes a long way toward determining your strategy in a traditional snake format, auctions allow you to be a lot more flexible. We’ll be taking a look at the best auction strategies over the next week here on SI.com, and we’ll start where every owner in an auction league should: the budget..

2014 Fantasy Football Sleepers Vol. 2

Jeremy Hill - RB, Cincinnati Bengals

Hill is the new power back to compliment Giovani Bernard in Cincinnati. The second-round rookie should play a role similar to BenJarvus Green-Ellis last season but with significantly more upside.

LeGarrette Blount - RB, Pittsburgh Steelers

Blount averaged five yards per carry last season in New England and his style translates perfectly to Pittsburgh’s smash-mouth style. He’s one Le’Veon Bell injury away from being a fantasy asset.

Storm Johnson - RB, Jacksonville Jaguars

Toby Gerhart is a true three-down back but he had better perform in his first season as a starter, because Johnson will be waiting for his chance. The talented rookie from UCF has the tools to emerge as a capable fantasy option.

Latavius Murray - RB, Oakland Raiders

Murray is only draftable in extremely deep leagues, but he’s a talented runner who is backing up two injury-prone veterans on the depth chart. Keep an eye on him if Maurice Jones-Drew or Darren McFadden goes down with an injury.

Darren Sproles - RB, Philadelphia Eagles

Sproles has caught at least 70 balls in each of the last three seasons and moved to Chip Kelly’s pass-happy offense in Philadelphia. He’s a big-play threat who should outperform his average draft position, especially in PPR formats.

Mark Ingram - RB, New Orleans Saints

Will this be the year that the 2009 Heisman Trophy winner breaks out? It could be, with Darren Sproles out of town and Pierre Thomas falling down the depth chart. Ingram is still only 24 years old and has the tools to be a fantasy star.

Jonathan Grimes - RB, Houston Texans

Grimes is emerging as the primary backup to Arian Foster with a nice training camp. Fantasy owners know all about Foster’s injury history and his backups tend to make an impact at some point during the season.

James Starks - RB, Green Bay Packers

Starks averaged 5.5 yards per carry last season and is a must-own handcuff for all Eddie Lacy owners. Starks instantly becomes a high-end RB2 in all leagues if Lacy goes down at any point.

Andre Williams - RB, New York Giants

The rookie out of Boston College will take a backseat to Rashad Jennings early in the season but is talented enough to eventually steal the job. Either way, Williams is expected to be the goal-line back and fantasy owners should keep an eye on him.

Emmanuel Sanders - WR, Denver Broncos

Peyton Manning has a new toy and that's great news for fantasy owners. Sanders has the skillset to make a significant impact as the Broncos’ third receiver.

Cole Beasley - WR, Dallas Cowboys

The Cowboys should have a dominant passing game and Beasley should be a capable slot receiver. He could emerge as one of Tony Romo’s favorite targets.

Odell Beckham - WR, New York Giants

The rookie from LSU is expected to stretch the field for Eli Manning and could be a nice fantasy asset immediately. His average draft position should creep up as he proves healthy in camp.

Golden Tate - WR, Detroit Lions

Tate moves to an up-tempo offense in Detroit and gets to play opposite Calvin Johnson, which is very good news for his fantasy appeal. He should be a nice WR3 facing single coverage on a weekly basis.

Mike Evans - WR, Tampa Bay Buccaneers

The No. 7 overall pick has lofty expectations and is in a great situation to succeed. The 6’5 Evans will find plenty of single coverage playing opposite Vincent Jackson and could be the league’s top rookie for fantasy purposes.

Charles Johnson - WR, Cleveland Browns

The Grand Valley State product has been a training camp standout and could emerge as a starter in Cleveland. The Browns will be desperate for a play-making WR once Josh Gordon starts serving his suspension.

Kyle Rudolph - TE, Minnesota Vikings

Rudolph isn’t necessarily a “sleeper,” but he could easily outperform his ADP. Norv Turner turns tight ends into fantasy stars and Rudolph is primed for a career-best season.

Jordan Reed - TE, Washington Redskins

Reed showed glimpses of his potential last season, when he caught 45 balls in only nine games. The sky is the limit if Reed can stay healthy in 2014. He’s simply too talented to be overlooked.

Eli Manning - QB, New York Giants

The younger Manning gets a fresh start with new offensive coordinator Ben McAdoo and he should improve upon his miserable 18/27 TD/INT ratio from 2013. You can draft him as a backup for fantasy purposes but he has the ability to sneak into the Top 12 QBs when the season concludes.

Andy Dalton - QB, Cincinnati Bengals

Dalton was quietly a fantasy monster last season, finishing with 4,293 passing yards and 33 TDs. Doubters will say Dalton is streaky, just signed a huge deal and has a new offensive coordinator, but, regardless, he is an absolute steal at his current ADP.

Josh McCown - QB, Tampa Bay Buccaneers

McCown was an elite fantasy QB during a three-game stretch last season and parlayed the success into a starting gig in Tampa Bay. His new weapons (Vincent Jackson and Mike Evans) resemble his old weapons (Brandon Marshall and Alshon Jeffery) in both size and ability. McCown is a sneaky option if you need a QB late in your draft.

Put simply, an owner cannot expect to have any success in an auction if he or she has failed to make a budget before the first gavel falls. The logic here should be intuitive. Every owner enters a standard draft with some sort of plan, no matter how detailed. One owner might want to focus on receivers early. Someone with the first pick might grab Charles first, cross their fingers for a quarterback and receiver at the turn, and then focus on best available. A third owner may be going the zero-RB route. There are a lot of different ways to skin a cat in a draft, but every owner heads into one with some sort of tool.

Outside of the familiar structure of a draft, those cookie-cutter strategies break down. Without a draft slot to dictate who picks when, many owners become overwhelmed with the new set of challenges. The only way to avoid this is to have a budget that provides you with a road map for navigating the auction but is still loose enough to allow you to deviate when an opportunity presents itself.

The first thing to do is to know your league’s settings and roster requirements -- most auctions use a $200 budget. From there, find a reliable list of average auction values so you have a general sense of the price tag required to secure each player. Of course, every auction is different, and players are in most cases going to cost something other than their average value. However, Charles doesn’t need to go for exactly $57 (his average auction value according to FantasyPros) to make this knowledge useful.

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Let’s say one prong of your strategy is to get Charles, McCoy, Matt Forte, Adrian Peterson or Eddie Lacy. Those five backs have average auction values ranging from $41 to $57. That means you can earmark $55 for your RB1 and feel comfortable that you’ll come away with one of these guys. If you get Forte for $55, you’ve just acquired a top back at a price that you know you can afford. If you get Lacy at $45, you’re still happy, and you know you have $10 to spend elsewhere. While other owners in your league are throwing cash around blindly, you’ll be the Warren Buffett of the room, spending wisely, taking risks where you can, and being safe when it is required.

Having a budget allows you to shift resources around as the market in your auction is set. Owners tend to be a little freer with their money early in an auction, and then get forced into uncomfortable positions when they don’t have enough cash to capitalize on the bargains that inevitably present themselves later.

By having a pre-set budget, you can instantly redirect the money you set aside for a certain spot once said spot is filled. Using the example above, you now have $10 that you can use on someone else that you had previously reserved for your top running back. If you sat down at your auction expecting to spend about $15 on your quarterback, the going rate for someone like Colin Kaepernick, you could perhaps choose to price yourself a bit higher by re-allocating that crisp Alexander Hamilton still in your pocket to the quarterback position. That could mean an upgrade to a Matthew Stafford type. It’s a whole lot easier to adjust on the fly with a budget to guide you.

The auction format allows fantasy football owners to build an ideal team in their heads -- with every player in the league at their disposal – ahead of time, and then bring those teams to fruition. The only way to do that, however, is with a sound, calculated budget set prior to the auction. That has to be the underlying strategy from which all other roster-building tactics derive.

FANTASY FOOTBALL AUCTION STRATEGIES:
I. Setting position budgets
II. Strategically nominating players
III. Finding bargains at quarterback