How to DOMINATE Your Fantasy Football Auction Draft with Drew Davenport

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Ian Hartitz is joined by Drew Davenport of Footballguys, host of Auction Brief
with Drew Davenport, to break down how to actually win a fantasy football
auction draft.

If you have never done one, this is the episode to start with. If you have done
twenty, Drew has been doing them for 25 years and still has to work at keeping
up with the room.

What they get into:

The biggest mistake new drafters make is underestimating the speed. Get your
software, your sheet and your tiers situated before it starts, because after the
first couple of guys it moves fast. And beginners tend to go to one extreme or
the other: two players at $65 each feels great until you realise you have 14
roster spots left and $70 to fill them.

Early nominations matter more than people think. Drew calls it the sitting down
bonus, when everyone is still getting settled and a Jahmyr Gibbs goes for $52
and you wonder what just happened. He went back through the King's Classic, a
14-team expert auction, and counted 28 nominations across the first two rounds,
26 of them starter-level players. If you are not active early, the top 24 are
gone and you are sitting there without a first or second round pick.

On nominating: he likes calling handcuffs early, with a caveat about how far
down the tiers you go. Call a Jordan Addison type while everyone still has money
and he might go for $11 or $12 instead of the $6 he costs late. Call the very
bottom guys early and nobody bites at all.

On build style, he is almost always balanced in a 12 to 14 teamer and has never
liked his own teams when he spends at the top of a position group. It is a
sliding scale by league size: in a 10 teamer the waiver wire is rich enough to
ignore your bench, and you differentiate at quarterback and tight end instead of
blowing them off.

And the piece most people skip: the par sheet. Drew does not use percentages or
ranges, he writes down an exact dollar amount for every single position, and
builds two or three variations before he walks in. Miss your number on one guy
and you know exactly where you have to make it up.

Plus what actually changes from a snake draft, why late-round quarterback is far
easier to pull off in an auction, why he thinks the auction community has not
caught up to the running back pendulum swing, and how to prepare in 10 minutes
if that is all you have.

Drew also takes the auction hat off and puts the lawyer hat on for the latest
Josh Jacobs update.

Follow Drew at @DrewDavenportFF, read him at Footballguys, and
Auction Brief with Drew Davenport.

Timestamps:
0:00 Talking auctions with Drew Davenport
1:20 The biggest mistake new auction drafters make
5:32 Chill or pounce in the first few picks?
9:02 Nominating strategy
14:31 Stars and scrubs, or balanced?
18:58 RotoWire, code IAN20
19:32 The par sheet
23:28 What changes from a snake draft
28:10 Lawyer hat on: the Josh Jacobs update
31:33 How to prep in 10 minutes
34:26 Wrapping up