Tips, tricks to dominating your fantasy football auction draft

I get many different kinds of questions about fantasy football, but one stands out, year after year, as everyone's most pressing, stress-inducing inquiry:

What are the best/worst draft positions to have?

Remember 2007? You might, if reminded that was the year following LaDainian Tomlinson's record-setting campaign of 410 fantasy points, and a draft season during which everyone wanted the No. 1 overall pick -- and only the No. 1 overall pick.

Remember last year? That was the one when everyone dreaded having the top pick, and frankly we'd all have been happier with the five, so that someone else could make that "impossible" decision for us between Adrian Peterson, Le'Veon Bell, Eddie Lacy, Jamaal Charles and Marshawn Lynch.

How many of you hope against hope that you won't draw the dreaded 10-spot (or the 12, if your league is 12-team, etc.)? Heck, I've got a local league that, for years, has elicited an audible groan -- often coupled by unprintable words -- from the owner who draws the last pick, as if it were a death sentence.

Ah, but there is a simple solution to this conundrum, an oh-so-easy fix destined to melt all of your draft-positioning stress away.

Have an auction.

Gone are the complaints from nine owners about having no chance at owning Antonio Brown. Gone is the difficult decision as to what round in which to address the quarterback and tight end positions. Gone is the frustration of having that player you so desperately wanted stolen with the pick directly before yours, that player you simply could not justify taking so early as the round before.

In an auction, you've got access to every player. If Brown is the player you desire, there's an easy way to get him: Open your wallet and pay $1 more than the others in the room will. If you want a top-heavy, star-studded juggernaut -- surrounding Brown with Cam Newton, Adrian Peterson and Rob Gronkowski, for example -- you can, so long as the combined prices of all four remain within your team's budget. You might wind up with nothing but $1 players surrounding them -- what's termed a "stars-'n'-scrubs" strategy -- but you gain the ability to own a style of team you'd have no chance at securing in a draft.

First, let's explain how an auction works: Each team in an auction is granted a predetermined budget, traditionally $200, with which to "purchase" a roster of players, typically 16 players in ESPN leagues. Players are nominated in a preset order, where a team nominates a player for bid at a specific price (which doesn't have to be $1). Teams can then up the bid, increasing it by $1 or even jumping it by $50 or more, and that process continues until no other team is willing to increase the active bid. An auctioneer -- you'll want to choose an entertaining, yet forceful and organized individual to fulfill this role if you do the auction live -- then counts down the bid, "Once, twice, SOLD!" and then the process restarts with a new player nominee. This continues until every team has filled every available roster spot, and no team is allowed to exceed its budget in doing so.

For more information on ESPN's auction drafts, including how to set up your own to conduct online, go right here.

Though that probably sounds simple enough, success in an auction is an entirely different story. Strategy is paramount in an auction, which moves much more swiftly, engages your attention in many more dimensions and takes a lengthier amount of time than a draft. In a serpentine draft, an inexperienced owner can more easily hide behind any ranked list of players from any source. In an auction, players are often nominated in random order, market values (especially at specific positions) can quickly shift, often multiple times in the same auction, and bargains can appear at any stage, as opposed to mostly in the latter stages as is often the case in a draft.

Crafting your strategy

Here's the simple truth: Don't get cute.

"Strategy" in an auction shouldn't be misconstrued as finding some unique angle, some particular -- or particularly unusual -- approach. "West Coast Offense QB-WRs," "Fifty-catch Running Backs" and "Age-25 Players Only" might sound like snazzy strategies, but setting such parameters significantly hampers your team flexibility, and in the majority of cases, winds up causing you to waste auction resources, to overpay for certain players just to make it work. If you're trying to brand your strategy, you're probably doing it wrong.

Strategy merely means crafting a plan of attack. For me, that's a meticulous approach to ranking and projecting players, from which I create a detailed price sheet -- we'll get into how to do that in a moment. If I've done this correctly, auction strategy is easy: I aim to buy every single player I possibly can for cheaper than his projected price, refusing to overpay for anyone. Maintaining balance within the roster is also important, but the more detailed your price/cheat sheet, the easier your job at the auction table.

The price/cheat sheet

There's nothing more critical to auction success than the price sheet. If you don't know what a player is worth in advance, how do you know what to pay at the auction table?

Every price/cheat sheet should list every player you anticipate can or will be sold during the auction, in ranked order from the most to least valuable by position, with a price tag applied to each. Ideally, these will include cents -- as in, $20.35 is even more helpful than $20 -- and they'll be calculated off your own rankings and projections. To help you with this, I've added dollar values to my own rankings, but it's also a good idea to run your league's specs through our Custom Dollar Value Generator for a second source. We also provide an auction cheat sheet for standard, 10-team, $200-cap leagues.

Always ensure that the total value of the players you project to sell adds up to the total amount of the league's available money in the auction; this means that in a 10-team, $200-cap league, the total prices of all your players needs be $2,000. This should also include your decisions on the percentage of the overall budget you feel the league will spend at each position. I find that quarterbacks usually comprise 8-10 percent, running backs 45-55 percent, wide receivers 35-40 percent, tight ends 4-8 percent and kickers and defense/special teams between half a percent and two percent.

If you play in a league that has existed for multiple seasons, it's often a good idea to ask your commissioner for past-years' auction results, especially to give you a sense of the percentage of the budget to allocate to each position.

From prices to planning

Once your price sheet is done, it's time to decide on a plan of attack during the auction. Most importantly, decide how much you're willing to spend to acquire talent at each specific decision, and determine the amount of depth you require at each.

For example: If you feel that owning a top quarterback is imperative, then you'll probably need to budget $20-25 to secure the services of a Cam Newton, Aaron Rodgers or Russell Wilson, and you'll need to adjust your calculations at the other positions accordingly.

Understand that this is different from the process of creating your initial price sheet: That's pricing players across the entire league, as opposed to identifying your personal preferences. If you decided at the onset of creating your price sheet that you wanted to spend $1 on a quarterback and therefore allocated $10 to the quarterback position, you did it incorrectly and need to return to the previous step. It's entirely fine to set prices at quarterback that reflect those from our Custom Dollar Value Generator or our auction cheat sheet, yet decide that for your own team, you only want the $1 quarterbacks. These do not have to be the same.

That's not to say that you should lock yourself into those numbers, being completely inflexible. They're outlines rather than demands, and if you find, midstream, that all of your quarterback targets are selling for $5 more than your projected prices, do some quick math to shuffle your funds around. Better yet: If you land your desired quarterback for $10 beneath your projected cost, then that's an additional $10 you can allocate to other positions during the auction.

Next, give a quick run-through of your price sheet to determine candidates to nominate when it's your turn. Hype machines you're not targeting tend to be ideal choices; you want to note any player you think might sell for significantly more than your price, so that you can nominate them in the early stages.

The tricks of the auction table

As mentioned above, the ideal strategy is "buy value," in which you try to roster as many players as possible for prices beneath what's listed on your cheat sheet.

Still, here are some angles you can try to gain an edge:

• Set the market early. When auctions first hit the mainstream, it was commonplace to hear the advice, "Don't buy any players during the first hour. In fact, show up an hour late, just to make sure you don't buy anyone," or "Never, ever nominate a player you actually want until the second half of the auction."

Both of these pieces of advice are so tired, so well-circulated, that the reverse often tends to be true: The bargain of more than half of the live auctions in which I've participated in the past half-decade or so have actually been sold in the first 15 minutes, and in fact the bidding overall has been most conservative with the first 10 players.

Be prepared at every stage of your auction, and in this case, it's often a good idea to throw out a highly ranked player that you actually want at a given position. For example, if you're dead-set on acquiring either David Johnson, Todd Gurley or Ezekiel Elliott, the wisest move might be to make the one you want most your very first nomination, simply so that you can either set the perceived market for these similar-tier players, or perhaps sneak through the one you wanted most at the fairest price. You'd be surprised how often a $45 Todd Gurley gets thrown out there first, only to be followed by a $55 Johnson and $53 Elliott.

• Get your kicker out of the way. My home league hates this piece of advice, because they think there's nothing more boring than having to listen to the "Once, twice, SOLD," slower-paced countdown in the early stages of an auction, when we're talking about a $1 kicker. There's a reason, however: Kickers should never, ever sell for more than $1, and the quicker you nominate yours, the higher the kicker on your cheat sheet you'll acquire. Besides, even if your competition increases the bid to $2, that's $1 wasted, which is a win-win, especially since it means you're only going to nominate your next highest-ranked kicker with your next turn.

• Track every roster. Though this might seem like an overwhelming exercise, the advantage -- especially in the auction's latter stages, when funds are tight and roster spots dwindling -- can be substantial. Success in an auction isn't only about knowing where your own team stands, it's also about knowing where your competition stands, in terms of ability to contend with you for your desired remaining targets.

  I can't tell you how many times I've been in an auction, knowing full well exactly where my opponent stands in terms of remaining budget and available roster spots, and seen him or her lose out on a desired bid -- usually getting visibly aggravated -- merely because he/she failed to realize another team had more remaining money or had a similar need at that position. At any given point, I can tell you exactly what every team in the auction has left to bid and the positions left to fill, and I use that information to craft my late-round nominations, and often the bids themselves.

  Be the geek: Bring your laptop, if you must.