I’m in, Off With Their Cheeseheads has joined the league.
Do we know what kind of draft we’re having? I need to know which particulars I should half-assedly research and then proclaim myself an expert in.
Auction is taking a slight lead, so we’ll go with that. Hooray!
OK, I am not terribly familiar with exactly how an auction draft works. Are there guidelines listed somewhere?
I’d recommend doing a quick mock draft to familiarize yourself with the layout of the draft website. You’re given a budget of $X. The draft will have a nomination order - a team will put a player up for bid, and you can raise the dollar value with each bid on him. There’s a 30 second clock, and bids after 5 (maybe 10) seconds will reset the clock to 5 (maybe 10?) seconds - so there’s no last second bid for the win.
You fill your roster with players you win. There’s no mandatory number of positions you have to draft or anything, and you don’t have to spend every dollar (though you should, because you don’t get to keep it).
Thanks, will do. I didn’t see the Mock Draft link until just now.
To add to this for anyone who’s doing an auction for the first time. Please be ready to nominate immediately when it’s your turn. It’s not like making a pick in a snake draft. Just because you nominate someone doesn’t mean you have to take them (unless it’s someone you end up getting for $1 late in the draft). Just put up whoever’s at the top of the list if you’re not sure. Waiting to put the nomination in can really make the draft go forever.
OK, I just did a mock auction draft, which is called Salary Cap Draft on the mock-draft page. It takes quite a bit longer than a standard draft, so be prepared.
This, for sure. If everybody takes 30 seconds for their nomination, it can really drag things out.
I do have another question: Each week, a team is eliminated, and those players are available for other teams to pick up. How, exactly, is that done? Is there another auction?
GREAT question. It’s done via a Free Agency Acquisition Budget (FAAB). You get $100 (or $1000, I’m not sure at the moment) during the regular season. After the games pick, all the free agents are put on waivers. Once the lowest scoring team is eliminated, that team’s players are also put on waivers.
Waivers run Tuesday/Wednesday night. If there’s a player you want, you put a blind bid in for him. When waivers run, the team with the highest bid gets that player. Tie goes to the waiver order.
I’ll go in and reduce the nomination period to a much lower period. Nomination delays are the #1 reason people hate auctions.
If it’s like the mock auction I did a couple of hours ago, if you miss your nomination, the software automatically nominates the highest-rated player available. So you may get a guy for $1 that you don’t really want or need.
Which is why I ended up with 3 quarterbacks. Lesson learned.
You should always have an active queue going of players that you either intend to nominate or intend to draft - if your nomination clock expires, the computer will put up the next player from your queue.
I’ve set the nomination time to 15 seconds, and kept the bidding time at 30 seconds. Our budgets are $200, and FAAB is $1000. I do not see if I can allow $0 waiver picks, but I believe that’s the default.
This will be fun. It’s been a hot second since I’ve done a auction draft, and my 2nd try at a Guillotine league.
I did another mock draft last night (after a cocktail and a hit on the vape). The last few rounds featured everybody having just enough money to complete the 15 rounds.
For example, I had purchased 9 selections, but I only had 6 dollars left. Others had 12 selections with 3 bucks left, and so on. So everybody got whoever they nominated the last several rounds. I suspect this may be a common occurrence, but perhaps not.
Draft is a week from today?
It is.
Usually a player’s last few selections are made with a dollar or two yes. It can help to save a few bucks at the end where you may be able to outbid someone for your end of draft sleeper by bidding $2 when they only have $1 for each pick. But there’s a lot of variation in draft strategy. We’ve had people blow almost all their money on 3 star players, and we’ve had people not pay for anyone expensive and instead rule the middle and end by being able to buy a bunch of players for $10-20 when everyone else blew their money on stars. It’s sort of like in a snake draft being able to choose 3 first round picks and the rest of your draft is 12th rounders, or decide you’d rather have 12 6th round picks instead. This is one of the reasons auctions are so interesting. It keeps everyone involved in every pick, because you don’t know when you’ll suddenly find value, and it allows for a much wider variety of draft strategies.
Question on one element of this - the FAAB of $1000 that we get for the weekly waiver wire. If I submit a bid for $200 but another owner spends $300, do I lose the $200 or keep it (pretty sure losing bids keep the dollars, but would like confirmation).
I’m hoping the rule is that if you submit a losing bid of $200, you lose that FAAB money. Everyone else in the league gets it back. We can call it the Wilson Rule.
Unless this league is vastly different from every other league I’ve played in, you should get your FAAB money back if you don’t win the bid.
That makes sense.
Just like the Hamlet Rule in the He Hate Me league where I can have you keep Patrick Herbert instead of Justin.
Ahhhh. Good comeback. We both know you’re too honest, too gentlemanly, too darn upstanding to do something like that. We are incredibly lucky to have you as commish in that league.
Now if you could make it Justin Jefferson instead of Justin Herbert, that’d be great!