Fantasy Football: ESPN's Auction Values At Least Make Sense; CBS Sports' Rankings Do Not
By Jason Lisk
The problem is that every league is different, and it’s not immediately clear what the dollar values are based on. If you are setting auction values, and you want them to be useful at a draft, you need to know a few things: the number of teams, the number of roster spots to be filled per team, and the amount of dollars each team has to spend. For example, a 12-team $100 auction league with 16 roster spots per team would have a total of $1,200 spent on 192 players. Your list should have 192 players on it, distributed between positions in a manner consistent with league rules or how things usually go (if there is flexibility and no limits on positions), and the combined total for all those players should add up to exactly, not one dollar more or less, $1,200. If it does not, then you are either overvaluing or undervaluing the player pool, and it will cost you.
Which brings me to Jamey Eisenberg’s auction values at CBS Sports. It doesn’t list what kind of league it is designed for (10 team? 12 team?) or tell us what the cap amount is. When I ran through all the values assigned, I got 189 players who were ranked at $1 or more, and a total of $1,328 dollars spent on those players. You may notice that 189 is not divisible by either 10 or 12, and that 1,328, when divided by either $100 or $200 (the two most common auction amounts per team) isn’t a round number either. Either these rankings are designed for that commonly used$132.80 auction league with 10 teams, or a $110.67 12-teamer, or wait, no it does work out. It’s a 9 team league with exactly 21 roster spots and a $147.56 cap.
At first glance, those rankings look like a $100 league, and so someone relying on them is going to overspend on players if they follow those values and not have enough to complete a roster. I could nitpick all day, but one clear area is that the second tier quarterbacks are all overpriced for what does happen at a $100 league auction. Other than my uncle who one year spent an exorbitant amount on Derek Anderson after already having Tom Brady (and was made fun of mercilessly) no one spends more than $3 or $4, at most, on a QB outside the top 10, and many backups go for $1 or $2. I think the decay rate in general is too shallow, and if you followed those rankings, you would (1) run out of money, and (2) overspend on middle level talent.
I then checked ESPN’s fantasy auction values. Structurally, the values match up for a 10 team league with 16 roster spots and $200 cap per team. They have a total of 160 players assigned values, adding up to a total of $2,000. Of course, I will have individual differences with the specifics of the rankings, but at least you could go into a draft and use those in a $200/10 team league and be fine. If you are in a $100 league you could just cut them in half (not quite that simple, you’d want to account for all minimum bid players, and calculate free money on top of that, but close enough if you are in a hurry).
With the CBS rankings on the other hand, I’m not sure what you can use them for. Though I’m glad they are there on the site where my auction league is hosted, as it may do me a solid on draft day if someone is not paying attention.
[photo via Getty]