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.

On August 13, I took part in The Huddle’s 2020 Expert Auction. I’ve participated in this league for a number of years now and always have a lot of fun as the league is actually played out. In years past, I’ve pretty much gone with an exclusively Zero-RB approach. Heading into this auction my preferred approach was to employ a Single-Elite-RB strategy. However, with the way in which the auction actually transpired, I ended up sinking a substantial budget into two RBs and allocating more dollars to the position than I ever have.

In the following, I’ll outline how I prepared for the auction, the approaches I expected I might end up using, and the actual path I took to put together my team.^[1]Before we get into the specifics, I am obligated to remind you that every auction is unique. No two will play out in the same way. League settings, roster requirements, auction participants, nomination order, and a variety of other factors will greatly impact pricing. As a result, do not try and extrapolate the prices that players sold for in this auction to your own. Even using percentages is a dangerous game — unless your league uses the same scoring system and has identical roster settings this will likely lead you astray. Truthfully, even if your league does employ the exact same … Continue reading

League Specifics

Each team has $200 auction dollars. Scoring is PPR. Starting rosters include 1QB, 2-3RB, 3-4WR, 1-2TE, 1K, 1 DST, and 16 roster spots.

Preparation

Tier Review and General League Observations

My first step in preparing for the auction was to review the tiers we talked about in Part 2. Given the roster settings, and what we’ve learned about in this series, I didn’t