matt forte

Going Once, Going Twice, Sold: Auction Fantasy Leagues Are Far Superior To Those Sleep-Inducing Traditional Leagues

Posted on by Ross Gariepy

gavel

With only seven weeks remaining until the 2013 NFL Season kicks off, you’ve probably noticed that your fantasy football commissioners have begun reactivating the leagues, sending out emails about rule changes, and trying to find a good time on the calendar for all the team owners to do the draft.

(It never quite works out perfectly though, right? Some idiot claims he can’t even find two hours over the entire month of August where he can sit down and draft. Or one of your friends who smoked too much pot in college forgets about the draft entirely even though you texted him seven times on the days leading up to the draft.)

Before you automatically accept all the invitations back to your leagues, do yourself one huge favor: Strongly urge your commissioner to turn his league into an auction format.

If you truly love fantasy football and want to have the best experience possible, you will do what it takes to graduate from the standard snake draft format to the addicting auction format. Blackmail the commissioner, organize a boycott of his league, hold him at gunpoint until he makes the change…WHATEVER IT TAKES.

You won’t be sorry.

[Side Note: Debating between a standard draft league and an auction league is like picking sides in a bacon versus pork belly argument. They’re both delicious and everyone’s a winner. It’s just a matter of personal preference.]

I broke free from the grip of the snake draft only two years ago, but already I could never imagine a time when I wasn’t all-in on the auction. The more I talk to people about fantasy football, the more I realize that auction drafting hasn’t caught on with the masses.

I look forward to this opportunity to try to sway some of you auction league holdouts because I know you’ll enjoy fantasy season that much more.

But first, it feels necessary to quickly set the stage for my arguments by giving some details on the rules.

[Side Note #2: While I’ll touch on some of the rules and strategies of an auction league in this post, I won’t cover everything. You can find a lot more details on the logistics of it HERE.]

In an auction draft, each team is operating with a set budget (call it $200 per team). This money can only be used during the draft period to bid on the players you want on your team. As you’d expect, you’ll be bidding in a live auction against other owners who may want that same player (the entire thing is automated via ESPN’s draft application). An owner will nominate an available player by bidding at least $1 on him, and then the rest of the owners can jump in and bid increasingly higher amounts on that player. If the cost of a player exceeds the amount you’re willing to pay for him, you simply stop clicking the “bid” button. A player is awarded to the owner with the highest bid once no other owner is willing to go at least $1 higher than that bid.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

This process goes on until all teams have filled all required roster spots. It doesn’t matter if you have extra money leftover. Once your roster is filled, you’re done with the draft. And whatever website you use for the draft will automatically make sure each team has enough money at all times to fill up their roster spots with at least $1 players. So a team can’t spend all $200 on five players and then have 11 empty roster spots that they get to fill via free agency.

Those are the only parameters enforced on you during an auction draft. The rest is your choice. Want to spend 95% of your budget on four studs and then fill in the bulk of your roster with $1 scraps? Go for it. Want to create a communist team where all 16 players cost you $12? You’re free to do as you please.

This leads to my first point…

1). A sense of control – In a traditional snake draft, you really have little control over what your team ultimately looks like. Yes, you can abandon the ESPN draft rankings and reach for a player you like who isn’t rated as highly as you think he should be, but for the most part it’s luck of the draw in terms of which “best players” are available once it’s your turn. On the contrary, you can walk into an auction draft saying “I’m getting these four players no matter what” (assuming you’re being reasonable and not targeting the four best running backs or something equally ridiculous). Nothing can stop you from getting your favorite players.

Now let me be clear: fantasy football is still a crapshoot regardless of your drafting format. But an auction draft gives you more control over that crapshoot. For instance, last year I spent $103—51.5% of my total budget—to acquire LeSean McCoy and Matt Forte. They combined for 304 fantasy points, or just four more points than Adrian Peterson had on his own (and Peterson only cost his owner $29). In that same draft, one of the owners grabbed Alfred “Who the fuck is Alfred Morris” Morris for $1 towards the end of the auction. While my $103 worth of “studs” was busy getting injured or being inept, this guy’s $1 no-name ended up as the fourth-ranked fantasy running back in 2012.

So yes, it’ll always be a crapshoot for the most part, but don’t you want to feel more responsible for your gems and busts?

2). Strategy, strategy and more strategy – Let’s face it, a standard draft has almost no strategy to it. You might want to pay attention if there’s suddenly a run on a specific position, but that’s pretty much where outsmarting your fellow owners begins and ends.

In an auction, when it’s your turn to nominate a player for the bidding, you may choose to select a guy who you do not want on your team under any circumstances. For instance let’s say you’re a Patriots fan and there’s a certain quarterback who’s burned your team in two recent Super Bowls. You may be thinking, “I’d rather have Aaron Hernandez pick me up in a rental car at 3 a.m. than end up with Eli Manning on my fantasy team.” In a snake draft, you stay far away from him. But in an auction draft, you nominate him right away for $1. Eventually the bidding ends and another owner shells out $12 for Manning. You just helped yourself out because that owner now has $12 less to bid on the guy you actually want, and he has one less roster spot available.

When you start researching auction strategies, you’ll see everyone recommending that you never spend more than $1 on a defense, a kicker or an individual defensive player. This is going to seem counterintuitive, but it’s not the worst idea to nominate the defense or kicker you actually want at the first chance you get. Why? Because either you get exactly who you wanted for the minimum bid, or someone goes over the top and bids $2 on that player. At which point you can laugh as your rival owner wins that player. I looked at one of my auction leagues from the 2012 season, and I found one owner who paid a combined $9 for his defense, kicker and three individual defensive players. He should have paid exactly $5 for those five positions. And trust me when I tell you that he could have used those wasted $4 towards the end of the draft when decent running backs and wide receivers were going off the board for only a couple bucks.

Bad strategy in an auction draft will come back to bite you in the ass, hard.

3). No reward for the guy who doesn’t check his roster – Seriously, how come the guy who doesn’t even check his team after the draft always gets the best player year after year? Oh, because he’s consistently the worst team. Right, got it. Why should that loser get first dibs on Adrian Peterson this year? With the auction he can still have him if he wants him, but now he’ll have to fend off nine other owners and be willing to pay a ransom.

Everyone should get a chance at every player. Outbidding your buddies with fake money to put together the best fake football team is your god-given right. Instead of treating the fantasy draft like an actual sports draft, we’re treating it like what would happen if tomorrow the NFL said, “You know what, this is boring. Every player in our league is now a free agent. Have at it, owners.” And that’s a lot more fun than just picking the player with the best value when it comes to your turn. BOOOOOORING.

4). No more waiting – Speaking of boring, how much does it suck when you have either the first pick or the last pick in your snake draft? You pick a player, and then you wait upwards of 30 minutes before it’s your turn again. I’ve actually fallen asleep during this downtime in the past (with the help of a sleep-deprived night before a morning draft).

With an auction, you can be in on every player. No more impromptu naps. And if you’re an adult with real world responsibilities who can’t justify sitting online for three hours drafting a fake football team, you’re free to spend all your money within the first 30 minutes and then leave the draft. It’s probably not a wise way to build a winning team, but you’re welcome to do it.

5). Auction chaos is the best kind of chaos – Have you ever been to a live auction in your life? It’s pure insanity. People start bidding absurd amounts just because someone else is doing the same thing. People go way over their preset budget for an item because they fall in love with the idea of having it. And people try to drive up the price for other bidders and end up stuck with something they never wanted in the first place.

This all happens in a fantasy football auction too. When people have money to spend and the pressure’s on, they just can’t help themselves. There’s absolutely no downside to this…unless you’re the guy who ends up with Drew Brees for $73.

That actually happened in my league last year. Someone bought Brees for more than 35% of his $200 budget. As a comparison, Tom Brady went for $53 and Aaron Rodgers for $61. So what happened with Brees? This owner apparently decided he was the last elite quarterback and he was getting him, balanced roster be damned.

6). Unintentional comedy is unmatched – By now you should be getting the sense that an auction draft is frantic. During a snake draft you have all that waiting time to plan your next move and some contingencies, but during the auction, things move at a ridiculous pace. Your best laid plans go out the window in a flash, and suddenly you’re sitting there with no backup plan. This is when hilarity ensues.

In my 2012 draft, Michael Vick got nominated and his price was hovering in the mid-teens with only a couple people in on the bidding. Keep in mind that most of the top QBs were still available. All of the sudden an owner jumps the highest bid by nearly $40 and “wins” Vick with a $55 price tag. Why did this owner go from $17 to $55? I have no idea, but it was the second funniest moment of the draft.

The funniest moment also comes with a word of caution to all owners because this will happen in every auction draft. You will be minding your own business, planning your next move, and then you’ll see that Adrian Peterson has just been thrown into the ring. You will say, “Obviously AP is gonna go for a lot, I’m gonna open the bidding in the thirties.” So you’ll up the current bid on Peterson to $35. And then you’ll get briefly confused when no other owner bids on him. And then the anger will set in. Because, buddy, you just paid $35 for the OTHER ADRIAN PETERSON…the free agent Adrian Peterson. Yes, that owner is a complete asshole, but you’re the one who just blew his load on a player who isn’t even signed to an NFL team.

This is a dangerous game we play. It’s fast-paced and unforgiving. Take a deep breath and make sure you’re looking at all the information. Otherwise you could end up with Michael Vick and the wrong Adrian Peterson for $90.

But I promise if you can avoid being that guy who accidentally spends all his money on two players who won’t combine to outscore Mark Sanchez in fantasy, then you’ll have the most enjoyable fantasy draft (and season) of your life.

Here are three more considerations to maximize the fun potential of your fantasy football season:

1). Bring on a co-owner – I’m not kidding. The league I’m in where I share a team with my brother is the one that’s most fun year after year. Why wouldn’t you want a partner to celebrate the victories with, lament the losses with, strategize about waiver wire moves and trades with. You know how everyone hates your fantasy football stories? If you didn’t know that, I hate to break it to you…nobody likes listening to other people’s fantasy stories, even if that other person is an owner in your league. But if you have a co-owner, you’ll actually be able to have lively conversations about your team and all the other teams. And of course, if you play fantasy football for money, it isn’t the worst thing to have somebody splitting all the costs with you.

2). Increase the winner’s pot with waiver wire money – In an auction league, the waiver wire process works differently than you’re used to. If you want to pick up a player, you’ll be submitting a blind bid in hopes that your bid is the highest. If you aren’t playing for real money, you’ll have a limited waiver wire budget so that each team has to be somewhat disciplined (i.e. so someone doesn’t bid $150 on Kirk Cousins after RGIII goes down in week 2). But if you’re playing in a money league, why not make the pot even that much sweeter by turning the waiver process into a real money situation. Sure, you can bid $25 to pick up Matt Barkley after Vick and Nick Foles get injured in the same game, but you’ll be putting $25 of your real money into a pool for the league’s eventual champion. Not only is this a decent way to police the waiver wire from ridiculous bids, but it also gets more money into the league. More money is almost always a good thing.

3). Make it a keeper league – There are a million different versions of keeper leagues out there. But here’s one way to do it in the auction format: Allow teams to keep up to three players from their previous year’s roster, but for each keeper they must pay the price they got that guy for the previous year plus 10 additional dollars. (Example: I drafted Andre Johnson for $32 in 2012. I’d say he was worth that money since he was the eighth best fantasy wide receiver. But if I want to keep him on my team for the 2013 season, I’ll have to pay $42 out of my $200 budget. Is he really worth more than 20% of the salary cap?)

Doing keepers this way means every couple years even the best players will be thrown back into the draft pool. No one’s going to keep Aaron Rodgers on their roster if it costs them $85.

I’m not saying this is the only way or the best way to do keepers in an auction league. I’m just saying it’s the way we do it, and it works.

Ultimately you may choose to ignore this article and stick with your old standby bacon, but I think you’ll regret not sampling the pork belly.

Satan’s Deal with the Mannings, Fun Times with Referees And the Rest of the NFL’s Week 2 in Review

Posted on by Ross Gariepy

Here’s how we’re gonna play this: I have some thoughts on the NFL officiating, but because every person reading this post has probably had their fill of bad refereeing talk already, I’m going to save it for the end. That way you’ll know it’s the last section and can skip it if you’re sick of hearing about the situation.

In week 2, there were no crazy signs or bad omens before kickoff that had me thinking a disastrous week was looming. But that’s exactly what I got (and I’m sure the same goes for many other degenerate gamblers). I only went 7-7-2 in my picks against the spread, I got slaughtered in both fantasy leagues (with the bonus kick-in-the-sack being possibly losing Matt Forte and Aaron Hernandez for multiple weeks), my dog got her pick wrong, and of course my Patriots were on the wrong side of the biggest upset this week. Dumb luck kept me from choosing New England as my suicide pool pick, but that’s a small consolation.

But enough about me. What non-refereeing-involved news went on around the league in week 2?

-Let me be the first to wonder if Green Bay’s offense is in a little bit of trouble through 1/8th of the regular season. They’re averaging 22.5 points so far, and I know it’s a tiny sample size, but we’re talking about a team in 2011 that went 15-1 while averaging 35 points per game. You can argue that facing the 49ers and Bears in the first two weeks put them up against two of the better defenses in the league. But don’t forget they were at home in both games. And in 2011, they averaged 31 points in their two games against the Bears. Just something to keep an eye on because if that offense takes a step back, their defense will have to play as good as it did against Chicago almost every week.

-I made a note at halftime of the first games on Sunday that Eli Manning had already thrown three interceptions, including one of the worst throws I’ve ever seen when he tossed it directly to a Tampa defender standing nine feet in front of him, but somehow this is the same guy that makes multiple impossible throws at the exact right time in the two biggest games of his life. As you know, Eli went on to lead the Giants to a great comeback over the Bucs, and then I made the following note: Isn’t it interesting that around the exact same time that Peyton’s deal with the devil ran out—2007 after he finally won a Super Bowl—Eli’s even more ridiculous deal with the devil seemingly kicked in? If nothing more, I guess we should all be thankful that Satan is only willing to help out one Manning at a time.

-It feels like we’re heading towards a weekly installment of “things Julie shouldn’t bother me with during the Patriots game.” This week was her attempt at showing me ridiculous Halloween costumes on Amazon that we could buy for our dog. There’s probably only two dog-related comments that could get me to remove my eyes from the TV during a Pats game: 1). “Our dog is gushing blood out of her [fill in any orifice ],” and 2). “Our dog is going into labor.”

-I won’t bother to do the research, but I wonder if any player has ever won both the Defensive Rookie of the Year Award and the Defensive Player of the Year Award in the same season. I’m holding out hope that Chandler Jones could be the first.

-In the same week that the media will finally stop jamming the Harbaugh vs Schwartz “handshake and pursue” replay down our throats, fucking Tom Coughlin and Greg Schiano have to go and create a whole new postgame incident clip to get overplayed for the next year. Perfect timing, fellas. God forbid ESPN and the NFL Network has to waste its precious airtime showing clips of actual football being played.

-As bad of a week as it was for my gambling habits, I’m happy to say my first season-long bet paid off. The bet was “which rookie QB starter will be the last to win a game.” I obviously chose Brandon Weeden, so I’m a winner. But the odds were -22,000 on him, so I won something like 1/550th of a penny. But the real good news is that my gambling website is letting me roll this bet over into next year. I got odds on all of next year’s rookie QBs getting their first win before Weeden does. I feel great about this bet.

-I found a funny yet miserable way of figuring out the status of my fantasy teams on Sunday afternoon without having to look at the scores on my computer or phone. Just look at the rolling fantasy leaders that every network shows on the bottom of the TV screen during games. Usually they go through the top 10 at each key posistion…QB, WR, RB, TE. If you don’t have a single player in any of those top 10’s, there’s a 100% chance you’re screwed. It’s science.

-OK, I can’t resist. One refereeing comment before the end. When the real refs do eventually come back, I’m most looking forward to each of their first explanations over the stadium PA systems. I feel like they will get the loudest ovations from the crowd that any officials in any sport have ever gotten. Right?

-The thing I’m being most vigilant about this season is the “QB replaced due to ineffectiveness” winner. Nkilla and I both predicted John Skelton from Arizona would be the first, but an injury ruined our chances of getting that right. I think the new frontrunner has to be Blaine Gabbert of Jacksonville fame. He actually left this past week’s blowout loss because of an injury, but the Jags offense overall put up a lofty 52 total passing yards. There’s a legit chance they start the season 0-8 now with only this coming week at Indy as their one shot to not be 0-and-half-the-season. When they do drop to 0-and-whatever, they’ll have to make a change to Chad Henne (Jesus, just realizing this is the franchise most likely to relocate to LA if we’re ever gonna get a team around here. Do we really want this specific team?).

-I want everyone to know that Peyton Manning is the best n0-huddle quarterback the NFL has ever seen. Analysts have been saying that for years. But I also heard this year that Joe Flacco is the most unstoppable QB when running the no-huddle…And isn’t it true that analysts are always saying Tom Brady is the scariest QB when he’s running that hurry-up and not allowing a tired defense to make changes? But Eli’s pretty awesome at the no-huddle too, right? That’s what he uses to complete so many of his amazing 4th quarter comebacks? But I swear I just heard Jon Gruden say that Matt Ryan is the master of the no-huddle offense. I rewound my DVR just to double check. Am I supposed to believe that the NFL is comprised of about 12 QBs who are no-huddle experts and 20 QBs who can’t possibly be trusted to run a hurry-up offense? Or is it more likely that every analyst is just full of exaggeration and bullshit every time they get the chance to speak?

-Now on to this delicate officiating situation. I’m not going to rehash every little controversy that’s come up because you’re all capable of reading quotes from the players and tweets from some of the most-respected football journalists—all of whom are saying this situation has got to end now. People are questioning the legitimacy of the league at this point. On Sunday afternoon I got a text that said, “you need to watch only the STL/WAS game and write an entire blog about the officiating debacle going on there…in fact, you should pump out 5 blogs this week on these debacles in general.”

And that was before Monday night’s disaster (where the first quarter lasted for two-and-a-half hours because of the refs). It doesn’t help when ESPN announcer Mike Tirico refers to them as the current refs (huge stress on the word “current”) every time they’re making a call.

I have no idea what the real refs are asking for in their negotiations because I like watching football, not reading about avoidable drama, but they should feel confident as of Tuesday morning to ask the NFL to quadruple their initial demands. Because if these real refs don’t return soon, we just might see the first on-field murder in NFL history. I’m 95% sure that John Fox was close to snapping the neck of the replacement referee in Monday’s game vs the Falcons.

Final thought: Would you all agree that officiating in the NBA is pretty horrible? You would, and you’d agree without having any real stats to back up just how bad it is. But that’s life in the NBA—it’s a league that’s sometimes more known for horrible refereeing than for the actual basketball. It’s a stink that follows them around, which means everyone (fans, media, players and coaches) is constantly overanalyzing every call or non-call looking for reasons to scream about the officials. I guarantee at this point it’s more perception than reality, but it’s still what everyone believes. The NFL is running the risk of this big time. I know I’m already going into my Sunday viewing looking for mistakes the replacement refs are making. Does the league really want a situation where the public essentially puts an asterisk next to the entire 2012 season? I doubt it, but I’m also the guy who guaranteed the real refs would return by week 3, and that seems like an impossibility now. Let’s just hope these current refs continue to get booed off the field every week. That’s all we can ask for now.