Auction drafts are easy to “win” but even easier to “lose.” In this series, Dave Caban will overview the preparation, thought processes, and in-auction strategies needed to ensure that you’re ready for the intensity and challenges auctions will throw at you and are poised to leave your draft with a contender.

As promised in Part 2, we’re finally going to prepare for an auction. If you read through the materials included in Part 1, you’re no doubt aware that heading into an auction with a list of values that you’re willing to pay for each player can be dangerous. This doesn’t mean, however, that you can’t use available pricing information to assist with your preparation. You just have to remember that average prices might not be the prices that your auction settles on. This means that Chris Godwin can be bid up beyond his ESPN average salary of $34 and still be a “value” or player that you can bid on. Of course, I should mention, if it hasn’t yet been made clear, you don’t need to constrain yourself to only bidding on players that are values. In fact, this would likely work against you. One thing you’ll likely notice in just about all of the teams we build in the article is that they require you to be aggressive early. Auctions aren’t won by waiting for “values.” Values rarely come. Owners that wait for them quickly realize they have a lot of budget remaining and little to spend it on.

Gathering Average Price Data

Let’s pretend that we’re going to be drafting in a 12-team PPR league, hosted on ESPN, that starts 1QB, 2RB, 2WR, 1TE, 2FLEX, 1K,1 DST, and allows six bench spots. The first thing that I’d do is head to ESPN and gather average pricing data. I’ve taken the liberty of doing this for you and also assigning players to tiers. In many cases, there aren’t natural tier breaks, so this wasn’t an exact science.

The average salary spent on players in each tier is as follows.