The Auction Manifesto - Everything You Need to Know In One Episode

The summer is drawing to a close for the Auction Brief, but not before your Fantasy Football Lawyer Drew Davenport provides one final call to action in the episode everyone has been waiting for: The Auction Manifesto. Your host weaves a 70 minute tale of every concept and idea that has been discussed this summer into a coherent, chronological walkthrough of auction theory and the skills that make you an auction master. Don't miss the long-awaited Auction Manifesto as Drew hammers home everything you need to crush your auction on draft day. Enjoy, and let's go win a title!

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to the Auction Brief. There's a joy in these
games or not, taking you on a journey through fantasy football,
the law, and life. This all your day, it depends
on how much you want. And now you're legal analyst

(00:23):
and auction draft expert here to help you dominate your
fantasy drafts. Your host, Drew Davenport, there are full hearts.
He Hey, everybody, welcome into the Auction Brief. As the
lady said, I'm your host, Drew Davenport. You're fantasy football lawyer,
and thank you so much for joining me for the

(00:45):
final episode of the summer. This is your twenty twenty
four Auction Manifesto episode here on the Auction Brief, and
thank you so much for joining me. This is everyone's
favorite episode, it's my favorite episode, and I'm excited to
get into it. We have no pre today, We've got
no poker stories or long philosophical ramblings often to the

(01:06):
exigencies of life. We're not going to do that today.
We're going to get right into it, because today I'm
going to give you everything that you need to know
about your auction draft before you walk in there. The
two biggest draft weekends of the year are coming up,
and I know time is short, so we're not going
to spend a lot of time on anything today except

(01:26):
talking about everything you need to know in an auction
draft room. I have to say a couple things real quick.
First of all, thank you so much for everyone that
has been here to support me all summer. It's been
an incredible summer. And I want to thank all my
guests as well. We've had some unbelievable talent on this
show this summer. It's been an incredible summer, and I

(01:46):
want to thank everybody for their time in making the
auction brief great. And I want to thank you all
for supporting me because the numbers continue to go up
and I continue to get messages every day, multiple times
a day. Hey, I just dumbled across your pocket. I
love your stuff. I can never get tired of hearing that,
because I hope that I've delivered value to you for
the time and support you've spent with me this summer.

(02:11):
One last time, my sponsors for the show, FJA Fantasy Sports,
don't forget. You can use my promo code Auction one
zero to order your draft boards and get ten percent
off the best draft boards in the business and also
my fantasy football lawyer Patreon Network. There is a mountain
of content over there from the summer that you can
scroll back and access all the way back through the
middle of May. That's going to help you get prepared

(02:33):
for your drafts. So if you're trying to cram now,
it's just four bucks a month, head over there and
check out all of that content. So today is a
unique episode, and it's one of the best episodes for
me because I can go back over all the stuff
we learned over the summer and try to cram it
into this one episode, and you know what, I'm going
to miss some of the stuff, and of course I'm
going to miss some of the nuance. So if you

(02:55):
want to learn more about something that you heard me
talk about that you think, well, what does that mean?
Or I'm not exactly sure what he's saying there, go
back and listen to the episode. There's a whole episode
on nomination strategy. It's a whole episode on inflection points,
on bidding strategies, on stuff like that. Go back. All
that stuff is mainly evergreen stuff, and the guests have

(03:15):
given you their fantasy insight as well, not just about auctions,
but about players and strategies. So what I've done today
is I've thought about how to present this best to you,
and I thought about sort of walking through a draft
like I did last week, but I want to add
a layer to that, because there are two different things
I want you to take away from today's conversation. Number

(03:35):
one is that there are some theory ideas, some general
principles that we have to always remember, and we have
to layer those over the top of our practical techniques,
our practical approaches. We always have to layer them together
to provide the best result. So what we've got today
is the first part of the show is going to

(03:57):
be about the theory stuff, the stuff that I think
is absolutely necessary for you to be an elite auction drafter.
And then we're going to go into the second part,
which is a chronological step by step walkthrough from preparation
to the beginning to middle to late stages of an
auction draft. We're going to walk all the way through it,
from prep to the end. So that's going to take

(04:18):
you to the end of the summer. And I hope
that if you're listening to this on the way to
your auction or the day before your auction that you'll
consider coming back next summer and listening to all the episodes,
and if you've been a supporter all along, thank you
so much. This is episode twelve and it's going to
wrap up the draft season. But don't worry, because the
Auction Brief is not going away. There is a revival

(04:41):
of Fighting Chance Fantasy in the works. I'm going to
be hosting my podcast there for the foreseeable future, and
I will be doing shows during the fantasy season, unlike
last couple of years. So this is goodbye for now,
and I don't want to get emotional about it, but
it is goodbye for now. But we'll be back in
a couple weeks with more episodes of the Auction Brief.

(05:02):
All right, folks, I think it's that time. It's the
twenty twenty four Auction Manifesto, brought to you by none
other than the fantasy football lawyer Drew Davenport. Here on
the Auction Brief, let's do one more episode of Auction Talk.
Auction Talk. The first part of our episode today is

(05:22):
all about the techniques that we need to have in
our heads to be the best auction drafters we can be.
These are theories about how we can approach the game
better and how we can approach our auction drafting better
to be elite auction drafters. And I told you that
we're not going to start out with a long, rambling,
philosophical musing or poker story. But that's ninety percent true.

(05:46):
But I want to do a callback to an earlier
episode because it's a perfect way to set up today's episode.
I'm calling back to a previous episode in which I
quoted Henry David Thoreau and he said, go confidently in
the direction of your dreams and live the life you
have imagined. Drew, how does this matter when it comes

(06:07):
to auction drafting. Look, folks, if you are a follower
of the Auction Brief, if you're a follower of this show,
you know that there's words speak to me on a
bunch of different levels. You can take it as life advice,
you can take it as auction advice. It doesn't really matter.
The underlying point is what makes us good and what

(06:29):
makes us able to be great when it comes to
auction drafting because it is a labor of love. This game,
we have to remember, is a game that we are
trying to beat auction drafting is not serpentine drafting. Too
many fantasy football managers are all about player evaluation and

(06:50):
how much they can spend on a certain player, and
which player is going to break out, and this and that.
All of that's important stuff, But what we have to
remember is that success auction draft room is vastly different
than success in a serpentine draft room. Auction drafts require
you to solve an infinite amount of variables over and

(07:12):
over and over throughout the course of an auction draft,
so you must rely heavily on your cognitive abilities. We
talked about that earlier. Cognitive abilities, logical reasoning, problem solving,
intuition about what's about to happen next. Those cognitive abilities
are only there if you reach for them, if you

(07:35):
work for them. And that's why I go back to
Thoreau's idea for all of today's episode, Because if you're
sitting there listening to this thing and you're saying to yourself, well,
give me a magic bullet before I walk into my draft,
that is not how this process works. We go confidently
in the direction of our dreams. We live the life
we have imagined because we focus on what it means

(07:59):
to have have success, to become elite at the thing
that we are doing, and that takes some time. I'm
not here to tell you you're not going to learn
from today's episode, but I am here to tell you
that the things you're going to learn today don't become
automatic skills that you can master immediately. They become things

(08:19):
you can start working on as part of your auction draft,
as part of your process for preparing, and then when
you start to work on them, they become more and
more of an asset to you as an auction drafter.
And that's why I love Thorah's quote, because it's about
how bad you want it? How bad do you want
to live the life you have imagined? How badly do

(08:42):
you want to walk into your auction draft room and
dominate all the other managers in your room, Because don't forget,
this is a game we are trying to beat. You
can't just walk into the room and say to yourself
that if I get this player for eleven dollars, that's
a good thing. You can't be constantly player centered when
you're trying to succeed in an auction. It takes a

(09:05):
combination of player evaluation and game theory. And the more
advanced your game theory is and the more you work
on it, the more profit you're going to show. Remember
that we can't wear a path in the ground by
walking back and forth a couple times. We wear a
path in the ground by walking back and forth fifty times,
one hundred times, as many times as it takes to

(09:27):
wear down that path. That is how our brains work.
We have to train our brains to think in a
certain way, to think through a certain process, to think
through the cascading decision tree of what happens in the
middle of an auction. And we're going to talk about
those decisions as we get into the second part. But
don't forget that learning about this stuff, that preparing for

(09:50):
this stuff is how we become better at adjusting in
the middle of the auction. It comes from that work.
The learning, the instinct that you get that you develop
is from your process. There is no shortcut. What we're
learning is to stack small advantages small gains, and the

(10:11):
consistent application of certain techniques and advantages and timing of
those techniques and advantages when we use them leads to
a greater profit. And we stack those on top of
each other. We're not going to walk into an auction
draft room and get better at nominations and suddenly see
a ten percent profit increase. Maybe it's half a percent,

(10:32):
maybe it's one percent, who knows. But if we learn
fifteen techniques and we gain half a percent from each
of those techniques, we've just gotten seven and a half
percent better. It is the stacking of the small advantages
and the consistent application of those advantages at the right time.
You're not going to listen to this and get a

(10:52):
magic bullet, although I would argue that par sheets and
the way I'm going to discuss those in a minute
is in fact the closest thing you have to a
magic bullet. But there's no shortcuts here. You're not going
to walk into a draft and suddenly be an amazing
drafter because of any one thing you learned. It's about
the application of all the things you've learned. I would
argue that at any point in time, you can look

(11:14):
down at your par sheet and it's going to give
you an answer. And again we'll talk about that in
a minute. But what we have to realize is that
there are various, many parts of an auction. So many
auction segments that give us different strategies, different things are
effective during those segments. We have to change when the

(11:36):
draft itself changes, and the timing of those things that
we apply changes as well. There are far too many
people that don't have direction in the auction draft because
they have no prior plan about how they're going to
attack the draft. They think about players they like, they
don't think about attacking the game or the game theory

(11:58):
that allows them to land those players. So most people
have no direction. They're kind of just bumping around and say, no,
this is a good deal. That's a good deal, and
they end up with an uninspiring roster and they wonder why.
We have to think about how do we weave all
of these moves together to produce a beautiful tapestry, not
a disjointed, poorly mismatched amalgam of random color. If you

(12:23):
don't have a goal, if you're not driving towards a goal,
your roster will reflect that. And the phrase that we
always talk about is have a reason. Have a reason
for every single thing you do in an auction draft.
Every single one saying I like that player, or he's
going to have a big year, or that guy's going

(12:44):
to have a top twelve season. Those are not reasons.
The reasons are I wanted a top six wide receiver.
There was three off the board. I thought this one
was going to be the best price, and I had
the right amount of money on my par sheet allocated
for it for I'm going to bid. Those are reasons
I like this guy and he's going to score points.

(13:05):
Is not a reason. Have a reason for every single
thing you do, and the application of that idea comes
into into play, specifically when I talk about pressure and precision,
the reasons behind your actions. Should seek to put the
most pressure on your opponents with the most precise possible

(13:29):
plays that you can make your nominations, your bids. Remember,
the perfect play does exist. You're not always going to
hit it. In fact, you're probably not going to hit
it very often, but always chase that perfect play because
when you make the perfect play, it puts maximum pressure
on your opponents and then they make mistakes. I always

(13:51):
go back to Bobby Knight talking to his basketball teams,
and he used to say that if we make the
fewest mistakes, we're going to win the game. That is
the same thing in an auction draft room, you can
walk in and be better than most of your opponents
in that room right out of the gate, simply by
avoiding large mistakes. You can make small mistakes, but avoiding
large mistakes. You will learn that today by itself alone.

(14:16):
Always have a reason, Always think about why you're doing something,
and you will avoid those big mistakes. Putting maximum pressure
on your opponents, however, is going to allow you to
force them into mistakes. And how do we do that?
Will we do it a lot of different ways. We
do it through our nominations, through our bidding, through reading people,
and reading people becomes one of those important things that

(14:38):
we have to do, especially in live auctions, but you
can do it online as well. You remember two things
that Mike Caro told us about poker that apply to
auction and strategy and apply to everyday life with people.
There are two things you have to remember. People are
either acting or they're not. If they're acting, figure out
what they want you to do and and then disappoint them.

(15:02):
And the second law is the law of loose wiring.
Don't forget that. Oftentimes people don't act in rational ways.
They're going to do things that are irrational they're going
to wake up and bid on somebody that they shouldn't.
Just last week in The King's Classic, somebody bought two quarterbacks.
They were two top five quarterbacks. That doesn't make any sense.

(15:23):
You can have an idea about what is rational, but
people aren't always going to act rationally. They have loose wiring.
When the results of their actions are not closely tied,
they're almost never going to act rationally, And when the
results of their actions are closely tied, sometimes they're still
going to act irrationally. So, in general, humans have loose wiring.

(15:46):
We have to be able to read when they're going
to act and what they're going to do. We have
two different kinds of reads, right, We talked about this
a couple episodes ago. We have game based reads and
we have human reads. What's a game based read? Well,
the game based read is what is somebody doing when
they bid? Do they always click plus one? Do they
always type in their bid? Do they always yell out

(16:08):
their bid at the last second? Do they bid all
the time when they want to play her? Or do
they just wait till the end and try to take
a sniper bid at the end when they're nominating Do
they nominate somebody they want? Do they nominate the person
at the top of the page? Do they nominate somebody
they don't want. These are all things that we can
read that are game based. How about human reads. We
talked about that as well. Human reads are not a

(16:31):
Eureka moment. You don't say, hey, look at that person's
neck vein moving and I know they're about to bid.
That's not how this works. Human reads are a subtle
art and a subtle amalgamation, a subtle accumulation of observed clues.
It's not oh, she just did this, I know she's
about to stop bidding. No, it's an accumulation of observed clues.

(16:55):
Is the person nervous? Do they click their pen? Are
their eyes darting around the room? Are they staring at you?
Are they steering a hole through their computer? Is their
knee bouncing? Are they taking a drink? Are they crossing
someone off their list? Are they eating in the middle
of the bidding? Do they wait till the end of
the bidding to bid? All these things are tells that
you can put together, and you can put them all

(17:17):
together and then put them together with the context of
the moment. As well, so it's a complicated accumulation of
things that you observe, and you're observing them throughout the
auction because you're establishing a baseline at the beginning by
paying attention to what they do when they're relaxed, when
they're not bidding, when they're just getting into things, and

(17:38):
then you pay attention to them when they're in the
heat of the moment, when they're stressed, when they're in
the middle of a bidding war. All of these things
can be put together and woven together to give us
a greater picture. It is all small pieces of a
greater puzzle that has to be juxtaposed against the current conditions.
The current context within that auction is that context. That

(18:01):
context is what part of the auction are we in,
what's happening right now currently, with everyone's caps, with everyone's roster,
with everyone's ability to bid. This is all stuff that
has to be put together. It's none of it is isolated.
It's all stacked together to give us a higher degree
of reliability. That all sounds difficult and complicated until you
start doing it, And when you start doing it, you

(18:23):
start to wear that path in your brain and you
start to trust the process that has led you to
understand all of these things and to become good at
all of these things. So don't forget that there is
no magic bullet, but there is a way to consistently improve,
and that's to be aware of everything that is happening
in the room and to grind your way through the

(18:45):
draft thinking about all of these factors and attempting to
solve the infinite variables that allow you to go confidently
in the direction of your dreams and live the life
that you have imagined. Thus endeth Part one about the
theory behind the auction drafting. Let's walk through the draft
from preparation to beginning to early to late stages, and

(19:07):
how we should be attacking the draft practically considering all
of those theories at the same time. One of the
more underrated aspects of being successful in an auction is
your preparation and your mindset going into the draft. I

(19:29):
talked about this for the at least the first two
or three episodes this summer because it's so important that
people understand the level of preparation in an auction draft
is different. You can walk into a serpentine draft and
you'll have your choice of players in every round, and
you can pick the best player available and you can
walk out with a decent team. But if you do
not prepare for an auction draft in a more specific way,

(19:53):
and if you do not prepare for an auction draft
with a correct mindset about what you're going to be
doing when you get into the draft, then you will
not be successful at an elite level. You can go
in and pick some nice players, but you will not
be an elite auction draft ever, if you don't spend
the time in the preparation. As I always say, your

(20:13):
preparation starts after the previous auction the previous year. You
should be thinking about what happened in your draft the
previous year. In the days after that draft, then you
should be making some notes. You put them away till
the next year, and you pull them out and you say,
what did I learn last year? Be a history buff
of your league. Sometimes you're going to be coming into

(20:35):
a new league, but hey, talk to prior managers who
have been in that league. Look at prior results if
you've kept them, and if it's new, then look at
average auction values to figure that out. We're going to
talk about that here. In just a second. But you
must attempt to be a history buff, even if it's
a new league. What are the rules half PPR, full PPR,

(20:55):
super flex, tight end, premium, deep benches, deep league, shallow league.
These all give you ideas about what you should be
expecting with prices because of overall history doesn't have to
be necessarily your draft. But if your draft has prior history,
you must study it. That is absolutely massive. I just

(21:19):
had a conversation with Rich Reebar the other day and
we talked about The King's Classic and how he ended up.
He ended up holding the bag on a lot of
money later in the draft, and one of the things
he said, he commented, quite astutely, you've been in this
draft for quite a few years. I made the mistake
of not accounting for an extra couple teams in the
extra four hundred dollars in the draft room. That was

(21:41):
a very candid and incredibly insightful comment from Rich. I
have history in The King's Classic, and I've used it
to my advantage of the last two years, and I
felt like I come out of the draft with a
better team because of that history. Lesson the other thing
you can do to prepare for what you're eventually going
to see is to look at average auction values. Now

(22:02):
we've talked about that this summer, but I have to
go back over the idea. Average auction values are in general,
a glorified ADP. It's glorified average draft position. But I
believe that AAV is important in this stage of the preparation.
I don't think you should have AAV in your draft room.

(22:22):
It's only going to screw you up. Every draft room
is different. Things are going to fall different in every
draft room, and if you stick with your AAV, you're
going to have a bad time. AAV should be used
to dial in your plan of attack only. Okay, the
only time I want you to be using the AAV
is when you're preparing your par sheets, because that's giving

(22:44):
you an idea of what your goals can be, because
you're getting a general idea of the consensus of the
fantasy community. I hate talking about specific dollar amounts because
it's not really about that. It's about the attitude of
the fantasy community. You're trying to do is come up
with your attack plan, and you have to remember that

(23:04):
the general tenor of the fantasy community is what gives
us our eventual auction prices. There is an exponential counting
that happens with AAV. But that's a good thing because
it can show you a path to value. It can
show you where people are magnifying the problems with particular

(23:26):
players in situations where we've double or triple counted during
the summer. We can see a path through AAV about
how maybe we should attack a draft. And I referenced
in the prior part about par sheets, and this is
where I want to hit par sheets now because I
said there's no magic bullet, but I have to say,
par sheets are the closest thing you can get to

(23:47):
a magic bullet in an auction draft room. What is
a PAR sheet? Well, a par sheet is very simple,
but also I believe quite revolutionary when it comes to
giving you training wheels to make sure that you stay
on track during your auction. I still use par sheets today.
What are they? Let's just say, for example, we have

(24:08):
a sixteen man roster in a twelve team league. I'm
going to write sixteen roster positions on a piece of paper,
and then I'm going to come up with a specific
dollar amount for every single roster spot. I'm going to
write one dollar next to kicker, one dollar next to
d one dollar next to my last bench player, and
so on and so forth. How much money do I
want to spend on wide receiver? How much money do

(24:30):
I want to spend on running back, quarterback, tight end?
Exactly exact dollar amounts. Now, before you dismiss this ideas
as being too rigorous, let me tell you why this works.
Because you're going to take that sheet, I'd like you
to have a second sheet as well, with different prices
on it for a different approach. So I want you
to come up with two different attack plans, and sometimes

(24:52):
three can work as well. Do I want to be
QB heavy, wide receiver heavy one top running back? Do
I want to have a wide receiver in my flex?
Do I want to attack the top of the tight
end tiers? Whatever the case may be. Come up with
two or three different iterations of a PAR sheet, and
then when you take them into your draft, you don't
have to stick to those numbers, but it gives you

(25:14):
a guide for how you can be successful. Why is that, Well,
here's a perfect example. When you look down at your
PAR sheet, it's always going to contain the answer for
whether you should bid or nominate, or what you should
do next. For example, let's say that you already have
your wide receiver one on your team, and you have

(25:35):
on your par sheet that you can spend twenty six
dollars on your wide receiver two. If AJ Brown gets
called out and he starts to slow down at thirty
seven dollars, you think to yourself, oh boy, I spent
fifty on my wide receiver one. AJ Brown's a good
wide receiver one and he's at thirty seven dollars. I
want to bid thirty eight, and a lot of novice
drafters or drafters without a par sheet will bid thirty eight. There,

(25:59):
what's the problem. The problem is number one, you may
not get them for thirty eight, and number two, you
can't spend thirty eight because you're only allowed to spend
twenty six on your wide receiver two. You're not allowed
to bid. You already have your wide receiver one. You
have buyer's remorse for spending fifty dollars because you want
to bid on AJ Brown, but you're not allowed. You

(26:19):
already have your AJ Brown, and your par sheet tells
you that. Because if you bid thirty eight on Brown
and you land them, you are now twelve dollars behind
on your PAR sheet, and if you do that, then
you can write on your par sheet that you're twelve
dollars behind and you can figure out how to make
it up. And that's how the par sheet works. Every
time you land the player. It doesn't have to be

(26:39):
for the exact amount, but what you'll do is you'll
write on your PAR sheet what you landed the player for,
and then you're going to figure out whether you're over
or underpaid and add that to a running total on
the right side of your PAR sheet. So if you
wanted to spend forty five dollars on your wide Receiver
one and you spend forty seven, you would write out
to the side minus two because you're two dollars behind

(27:01):
the eight ball. But then let's say you turn around
in RB one you wanted to spend thirty two and
you spent twenty eight. You just gained four dollars. You
had lost two dollars before, but you just gained four.
Now you're two dollars in the positive. You're two dollars
in the black. Going forward, then you know you have
two additional dollars to spend somewhere else. You're going to

(27:22):
keep that running tally on your par sheet. And that's
why it's not rigorous, because you can adjust however you
want by simply looking at the par sheet and seeing
how much money you have to make up or how
much money you're free to spend on another position. And
what's the best thing about the par sheet. The best
thing is that it teaches you a lesson while you
make it. It teaches you the lesson of how valuable

(27:45):
every dollar is in that draft room. And it also
teaches you the lesson of what you value before you
walk into a draft room. So if you're making up
your par sheets and you say, boy, there just really
is no money at tight end bingo, you know that's
not something you value. And when you get into a
draft room, if you have to pull money from somewhere,
you say, oh, well, I didn't really care about tight

(28:06):
end before this when I was making up my par sheets.
I'll pull money from tight end, or wow, I really
didn't want to cut at my wide receiver one. Where
am I going to take money from? Well, I don't
care about my RB two. So you pull that from
your RB two to put on your wide receiver one.
You know your opinions about those situations because you built
your par sheets. The process of going through and building

(28:28):
the par sheets teaches you the value of the dollars
and teaches you what you value before you get in
the draft room. And that's what we mean. Hearkening back
to the first part when I talked about the process
and about being able to adjust on the fly. Knowing
how to adjust on the fly comes automatically because you've
done the work. I'll never forget the episode of Saved

(28:50):
by the Bell when Zach put his feet up on
the desk after a test. He had written all the
answers on the bottom of his shoes so that he
can look at the bottom of his shoes during a
test and sheet what It turned out that after the
test he didn't need to look at the answers on
the bottom of a shoe because it took him so
much time looking up the right answers and writing them
on the bottom of a shoe. He learned it. That's

(29:10):
what you're doing here. You're Zach Morris from Saved by
the Bell. You're going to do the preparation and when
you get in there, I guarantee that those answers are
going to come flooding back to you from the dozens
of hours of preparation that it took you to figure
out your plan of attack and then put your par
sheets together and get ready to go for your draft.

(29:31):
That is the process in a nutshell, and that's how
you adjust in the middle of the auction and have success.
Let's say that you're looking at your par sheet and
you said before the draft, I don't really want to
spend on tight end, but you've done really well so
far in your plus eight on your par sheet. Now
you had eight dollars listed for your tight end position,

(29:51):
and then Kyle Pitts comes up and the bidding slows
down at twelve bucks. Well, you're eight dollars that you
had pre draft and you're eight dollars now that you're
over allows you to say, hey, I can bid thirteen
on Kyle Pitts. You wouldn't have done that before if
you didn't have your par sheets sitting in front of you.
But when you bid thirteen on pits, if you don't
get them, you know that you can go to fifteen.
And if you get them for fifteen dollars, then that

(30:13):
means you spent seven of your positive eight plus the
eighth that you originally had earmarked for your tight end,
and you spent fifteen. Your par sheet told you that
you were allowed to do that. It allowed you to
get a better player than you thought you would. And
you wouldn't know whether or not to do that if
you're in the middle of an auction, because you don't
know where you stand for the rest of the auction.

(30:34):
And that's why the par sheet's so valuable, because it
tells you the future, it tells you the past, and
it tells you what you need to be doing in
the present moment. What are the other things you can
do to prepare well? The second most important thing beyond
a par sheet is your tier sheets. I have them
on my Patreon network. You can go download them right
now for just four bucks for the month. Go download

(30:56):
all of my values of my market prices, but tearshets
area for you to understand when the talent is about
to drop off. You should make up tear sheets or
download mine, whatever the case may be. And you should
know when a tier is about to get scarce, and
you should know that you should already have a player
from that tier if you need them, or you should

(31:16):
be moving on a player from that tier before it
gets dry. This also gives you the framework to know
what you think about every player, because when you get
in the middle of a draft, you have to know
how much you care about Zach Moss versus Gus Edwards.
You have to know how much you care about Devon
Chan versus Saquon Barkley. That stuff you have to know,

(31:38):
and making up your tier sheets gives you once again
that process. You are wearing down the pass in your
brain while you're preparing your tear sheets. I also want
you to have a nomination list. I want you to
have a list of players that you don't want that
don't fit your strategy. So, for example, if you're going
to go cheap at quarterback, then you're going to put

(31:59):
Josh Allen on the sheet of nominations that you can
make of players you don't want. Well, you're saying to yourself,
you don't want Josh Allen. No, that's not the point.
Of course, I want Josh Allen. He's amazing, He's the
QB one, But I'm gonna put him on my don't
want list because it doesn't fit my strategy. It doesn't
fit my plan of attack. So I'm gonna have a

(32:19):
nomination list of players I don't want. I'm gonna have
a nomination list of players I do want, and I'm
gonna have a nomination of players that are overhyped that
I feel like I can throw out at any point
in the draft when I want to waste a nomination
and I can spend some people's money on a player
that I don't really care about a great example of
that this summer has been for me, Lad mconkie. I
throw him out whenever the bidding is hot, because I

(32:41):
want somebody to spend eight or ten dollars on mconukey.
It's somebody I don't want a roster, and it's money
that I don't care about someone else spending, and it's
a player that I've never intended to roster. So these
are players you want to have on your three nomination lists.
So now you're prepared. You've got your par sheets, you've
got your tear sheets, got your nomination list. That's all

(33:01):
I want you to bring into the draft. I don't
want you to bring in anything with a number on it.
Get rid of those numbers before you walk into the
draft because raw dollars don't matter in a draft room. Yes,
it matters about your ability to land certain players, but
all that matters is that you're executing your strategy with
the numbers on your par sheet and you're able to
continue dominating the draft as you go through having near

(33:24):
or the most amount of money in the room. Don't
forget what somebody said earlier in the summer that I
talked about preparation is the key to making the draft
slow down. Football players talk about it all the time.
People talk about it in sports all the time. Period
When you are prepared, when you're more prepared than the
other people in the room, things slow down. The draft

(33:46):
itself is about the mental toughness to not only prepare,
but to go in there with a mindset that you're
going to succeed because you have done certain things ahead
of time that allow you to succeed. And I talked
about this quite a bit, and it's something that I
haven't in previous summers, but I think it's really important
to game some of the situations that you're going to

(34:09):
see go through, things that you're likely to see happen
to you anticipate the problems that are going to happen.
Your attack plan isn't going to be perfect. You're going
to get caught short. I'm part of your attack plan.
You got to figure out what are you going to
do if that happens. Say to yourself, well, I want
to get a top RB one and I want to
spend less than thirty eight dollars. What happens if none

(34:29):
of the RB one's that you have targeted go for
less than thirty eight dollars? Are you going to spend
more or are you going to blow off that position
and spend way less? What's your alternative if one of
the guys you want isn't the guy that you end
up getting. What is your pivot game? That stuff ahead
of time? Do mocks, Do serious mocks with serious people

(34:50):
if you can. But just do some mocks and get
some ideas in your head about how you're going to
react if things don't happen. The mental toughness, the mental mindset,
It comes through the preparation. You don't just walk into
a draft and say I'm going to be tough. No,
you walk into the draft because you're prepared, and you
know that you're prepared more than anybody in that room.

(35:10):
Or more than more than most of the people in
that room. Don't forget. I'm on Ross Saint Brown and
his dad earlier this summer on the Netflix show Receiver,
when his dad said that there was a player on
the field that was the best player on the field,
and he had these great hands. And he said to
his dad, what do you do to give him such
great hands? And the dad said, well, we have a

(35:31):
jugs machine at home many catches two hundred balls a day.
So his dad went home and said, all right, you're
going to catch two hundred and two balls a day.
That isn't about those two balls making you better as
a receiver. Those two balls have no practical effect. What
those two catches does for you every day is teaching
you the mindset of being dominant, of being better than

(35:53):
everyone else because you worked harder than everyone else. And
you know that going to the draft, that that's going
to be you, right, And you have to tell yourself
that when you walk in, and you have to spend
a little bit of time getting yourself into the proper
mind frame. And that leads us into the beginning of
the draft. How do we get in the proper mind frame? Well,

(36:13):
I'm going to tell you right now, there are some
things that you're not doing that I believe matter a lot.
If you're in a live draft, get there early. Find
the room early, Power up your laptop early, get your
program out, get your piece of paper, get your pencil,
do whatever you have to do early. Bring snacks, bring drinks,
go to the bathroom. However, you have to get ready.

(36:34):
Get ready. I know you're thinking to yourself, Oh, that's
all pretty simple stuff. Yeah, it's simple, but so many
people don't do it. So many people come rushing in
at the last moment. They're not ready, they're frantic, they've
just come from work, they haven't eaten, they're not ready
to draft. Their mind is in a million different places. Instead,
you're going to be there early. And this goes for

(36:55):
online drafting too. Get in the draft room early. Familiarize
yourself with the software. There's going to be somebody out
there right now listening to me that's about to do
an online draft on a platform they've never done before.
Don't put yourself in that corner. Get in the draft
room the second it opens. It usually opens thirty minutes
ahead of the scheduled draft time, So get in there.

(37:15):
Thirty minutes ahead, look around, click on all the buttons,
figure out how you put people on the watch list,
how do I bid? Where's the bidding bar going to be,
where's the remaining dollars going to be? What am I
seeing as far as overall roster construction? How can I
see all the rosters? Do all that stuff ahead of time.
It's really important. And then what you're going to do is,
five minutes before the draft, you're going to take a

(37:37):
huge deep breath. You're going to set your pieces of
paper next to your laptop, and then you're just going
to close your eyes and you're going to think, what
am I doing, How am I starting? How am I
going to be successful? Visualize that success, and I promise
the mindset helps you begin the draft strong beginning of

(38:00):
the draft. What do we always remember at about the
beginning of the draft? Everybody say it with me, the
sitting down bonus. I'll tell you what I was in
a mock draft just tonight as I'm recording this, This
just happened a few hours ago. There was no sitting
down bonus. This was a veteran room of veteran drafters.
They were off to the races, the room was extremely
hot right out of the gate. I got no sitting

(38:20):
down bonus. Sometimes it doesn't happen, but for the majority
of rooms, you're going to see a fairly cold room.
If that happens, be ready to strike, Be ready to
get in there and get a deal immediately. I'm not
saying to draft four players in the first eight picks
like I did at the King's Classic, But sometimes that happens.
Is the room timid, is it cold, or is it
aggressive and it's hot? Figure that out right away. This

(38:43):
is in the first round, the first five, eight, ten,
twelve picks. Figure out the temperature of the room. Be
ready to strike. If there's no opportunity there, then don't
worry about it. Don't worry about it. Just sit back
and watch. There is in a really important part of
the draft that's developing here right at the beginning, and
that is establishing a baseline for behavior of all the
other managers in the room. Look at the woman next

(39:06):
to you and say, what is she doing when she's bidding?
What is she doing when she's not stressed, when she's
not in the middle of bidding. How is she when
she's in the middle of a bidding war is if
it's online. Is she talking all the time and then
she clams up when she wants to land a player?
Does she bid at the end of the clock, Does
she bid at the beginning of the clock. All of
these things are baselines that you can begin to figure out. Watch,

(39:30):
learn your opponent's tendencies are on display for the first
time in the auction draft room. Observe that stuff, and
start to build your baseline because the later the draft goes,
the more they're going to vary from that baseline, and
you'll know what the variations mean because you know what
the baseline is. If a person normally sits there and

(39:51):
just clicks their pen over and over and that's just
what they do, then when they're in the middle of
a bidding war and they're clicking their pen, you're not
going to read anything into that because you already know
that's part of their baseline, right, that's just normal. Maybe
they're feeling something, but you can't figure it out from
the pen clicking because you know that's just a part
of their baseline. These are things that you have to
start figuring out from the beginning of the draft. So

(40:11):
look for your sitting down bonus. Look about look at
the room at the beginning. Is it timid? Is it agro?
What's going on in the room right away? Can't I
score a deal? If that doesn't happen, you're going to
move out of the sitting down bonus time fairly quickly.
And again, if you have not listened to my stuff,
you don't exactly know what this is, but I'm hoping
you're figuring out by now. Sitting down bonus is really

(40:33):
just a funny way to say that when you start
an auction draft room, oftentimes there will be deals. So
look for that at the beginning, and also look for
that after extended breaks. A lot of you out there
will have like a dinner break, or you'll have a
time when you stop the auction for a while, and
when you come back, oftentimes there is a mirroring of
the beginning of the episode, and you can get another

(40:54):
sitting down bonus, either right before the break because everybody's
thinking about their pizza or going to the bathroom, or
right after the break because they're still settling in and
figuring out how they're going to attack the rest of
the draft. So that's generally the beginning of the auction.
How do we notice when things are starting to change. Well,
we talked about that in the Inflection Points episode just

(41:14):
last week. You're going to have to start to watch
for the shifts in the auction, because, as I said
in the first part, there are four or five or
six different mini auctions within the bigger auction that are
going to dictate a change in your strategy, a change
in your philosophy, a change in your approach. So start
to pay attention. When does the shift come from the

(41:36):
sitting down bonus, the initial part of the draft, and
when does it start to shift into the next part
of the draft. Most of the time, what you're going
to see is that when things become really hot and heavy,
when market prices start hitting regularly, or when people are
calling out really low ranked players and they're going for
six or eight dollars and the really two dollars players,
that kind of thing tells you the market is fully open.

(41:58):
People realize, now, hey, I'm here, I'm in this draft.
We're ten or twelve picks in. Its starting to I
want to start to land some elite players. And what's
going to happen during this phase is that everyone's going
to nominate the top players. You don't need to worry
about nominating the top players. That's not important for you. Okay,
what you're going to do is look down at your

(42:18):
partitting and you're going to figure out what do I
need to be doing to push my strategy here and
during this initial shift and during this period of time,
there's going to be three, four or five rounds of
all the elite players being taken off the board during
that time, you have to get a couple players. You
have to get one or two players because those are
your first and second round type players. You wouldn't leave

(42:41):
a Serpentine draft without a first or second round player,
would you. So you can't leave your auction draft without
one of those players. So oftentimes it'll be tempting to
say these prices are too high, I'm not going to
pay that, But sometimes you just have to overpay to
land the elite talent. You can't leave without first or
second around picks. Prices will come down later and you

(43:02):
can guarantee that. But number one, you don't know when
they're going to come down, and number two, they might
come down too late for you to land in any of
the talents that you need. To land, so sometimes you
just have to overpay and get in there. You want
to avoid that if at all possible, but sometimes that's
going to happen. Remember that early in a draft, roster
spots aren't as important. That currency continues to grow and

(43:23):
value as the draft goes on, so you're not thinking
about that so much right now. Really, the calculus that
you're thinking about is the push and pull of need
and price, and that's going to follow you through the
next couple of many parts of the auction, the push
and pull of need versus price. Think about it like this,
we talked about it earlier. If you already have your

(43:45):
wide receiver one and AJ Brown is going too cheap,
do you need them or do you want them? Well,
we know you don't need them, but if you want them,
can you afford them? Juxtapose whether or not you can
afford them with the par sheet with your attack. So
at this point in the draft things are really humming.
Along with forty and fifty dollars players and thirty five

(44:05):
dollars players. Plenty of money is being spent, and the
different lenses that we have to look at what's happening
right now are fairly consistent as we head throughout the
rest of the draft. Those lenses are fivefold. The nominations
that you make, the bids you make, the reads you're
making on other people in the room, what the caps

(44:27):
are in the room, and what the rosters are doing
at that point as well. So you're going to look
at these five thingsnoms, bids, reads, caps, rosters. You're going
to look at those five things all the time. This
is why I talk about cognitive ability being so important.
You're looking at those five things all the time, and
you're applying those five things, but you're applying them differently.

(44:48):
The nominations that you make in this part of the
draft are going to be different than the idea that
you have later in the draft. The bids you're making
are going to be different now then later. So all
these things are going to change with each shift in
the draft. Right now, early in the draft, we're not
in the sitting down bonus section, but we're in the
grabbing elite players section. What you need to be doing

(45:11):
is not nominating the next elite player on the board
when it gets to you. You need to have a
plan for who you're nominating that's going to help you
figure out which par sheet you're going to use, because
if you figure out too late that you're switching par
sheets from what your initial strategy was, you have to
do that early so that you can pivot to other

(45:32):
top level players before they're all gone after you figured
out your initial strategy is not going to work. So
your first nomination, your second nomination, your third nomination should
all be trying to further your strategy of players that
you want to try to land. A lot of people
like to say, well, I started out an auction and
I like to call out players that are going to
waste other people's money. That is not a strategy. I've

(45:56):
said that multiple times this summer. I'm saying it again.
Think about it like this. If you think to yourself,
I don't care about Sakwon Barkley this year, I'm going
to call him out in the first round and waste
some of his money. Number one, you don't know if
that's a waste of money. Sa Kwon Barkley is a
very good player. If he stays healthy and if he
scores ten touchdowns, he's going to be a top five
running back. So you probably didn't waste their money. They

(46:19):
spent their money on an elite player, So number one,
that's not a waste. But think about it like this.
There's at least a couple players in that room that
want Sakwon Barkley, and if he's a forty dollars running back,
Let's say three players really want Barkley, then you have
tied up forty dollars in three players minds. By not
nominating Barkley, you've tied up one h twenty dollars in
the room, not forty dollars by nominating Barkley and letting

(46:42):
someone have the clarity that they've already got their RB one.
So as soon as you call out the player that
you don't want, it gives clarity to another manager in
the room who lands that player, and to the other
managers who are thinking about landing that player. You want
things to be muddy, right, You don't want things to
be clear for them them. So don't nominate players to

(47:03):
quote unquote waste money at the beginning of a draft.
That is not what we do. Instead, we nominate players
that are going to further our own par sheet strategy.
So at this point in time, again, all the elite
players are flying off the board. How are we bidding well,
I want you to be really active in this stage
of the draft. You're going to push push, push, push
push on all the top level players. I'm not telling

(47:25):
you to get yourself into trouble by bidding up to
forty eight dollars on Tyreek Hill and hoping somebody says
forty nine. Nope, that's not what we're doing. What we're
doing is we're not letting them walk the bid up
one dollar by one dollar and allowing them to get
comfortable with spending what they need to spend on certain players,
and not allowing them the comfort of having the time

(47:46):
to think about whether or not they want to bid.
We're not letting them walk that up dollar by dollar.
If it's Tyreek Kill and somebody says one, type in
thirty okay, get it there, quickly type in thirty five whatever.
Be comfortable with what you're typing in because I don't
want you to make a big mistake. But get the
dollar bid up there. If you know that the price

(48:06):
is going to get there, be as aggressive as you can.
That's what we talked about before. With pressure. We have
to pressure people, don't give them time to think. Also,
this is in the stage when you want to start
to think about bidding people up or price enforcing. Remember
those are two different things. Bidding someone up is a
human based, physical sort of history read. That's a read

(48:32):
that you put on somebody because you've seen them doing
something that you can hook into. You've been in them
with a league, been in a league with them before,
so you know what they do. Or you have a
tell on them that tells you that you can continue
to bid and they're going to continue to bid with you.
That's bidding someone up that's bald faced, just bidding them
up to try to get extra money out of them.
But there's also market price enforcing, which is less risky.

(48:55):
I believe bidding someone up has the most risk and
I don't think you should use it unless you're comfort
with it. But in market price enforcing, I really believe
you have to be able to market price and enforce
or you're not going to be an elite auction drafter.
In fact, I think both of these concepts are things
that you have to master, and you can only master
them by starting to do them. Do it a little

(49:16):
bit at a time. Bid somebody up one dollar when
you think that they're going to keep going and see
if they go an extra dollar. Don't put your draft
on the line by doing it in the upper forties.
Do it at twenty dollars, do it at eighteen, do
it at sixteen. Figure out what it is that you're
comfortable with doing to pull extra money out of the room.
But market price enforcing is an entirely different thing because

(49:38):
you're actually just trying to make sure that the player
goes for the right price. And sometimes that means you're
going to end up with that player. And as I
said earlier in the summer, that is not a bad thing.
Sometimes you don't always want to walk out of the
room with one hundred percent of the players you thought
you were going to end up with. Sure, that's fun,
but you're not right one hundred percent of the time.
So a roster that has one hundred per some of

(50:00):
the players that you like is more than likely going
to disappoint in some ways. Instead, I want you to
chase the value and say, if the market price is
too low, I'm going to bid, And if I end
up with that player, you say, Okay, that's such a
good deal that they ended up on my roster. That
is market price enforcing. And sometimes or a lot of
the time, you're going to end up bidding up to

(50:22):
a certain level that allows your opponent not to get
too good of a deal, to get too much of
a profit, and that's how you continue to pull dollars
out of the room. Think about it like this. If
there are twenty different players that you pull a couple
bucks out of. Let's say you bid two times on
a player that you consider to be too low. So
the players at fourteen and you say fifteen, and they

(50:43):
say sixteen, and you say seventeen and they say eighteen.
Then you're done. You've only bid twice, but you got it.
From fourteen to eighteen. That's four dollars that was pulled
out of the room because you did that, because you
enforced a market price there. If you do that on
twenty different players throughout the draft, that's eighty dollars you've
pulled out of the room. If you continue to do this,

(51:03):
and you do this aggressively, and you do this well,
you will continue to pull hundreds and hundreds of dollars
out of the room and your opponents will never know it.
You don't have to be aggressive by pulling eight dollars
out of this player and twelve dollars out of this one.
Get a couple bucks here and there on as many
players as you possibly can, and you will see the
cumulative effect of your bidding people up in your market

(51:25):
price enforcing by the end of the draft. So now
we're still in the second stage of the draft, where
elite players are flying off the board. What are the
reads that we're putting on people. Well, like I said before,
you have to be establishing a baseline at this point.
Notice their norms. Notice what they're starting to do with
their noms and they're bidding. This is when you're first
starting to see do they nominate somebody and end up
with them. Do they nominate somebody and don't Are they

(51:47):
unprepared and the timer runs down and it just nominates
the player at the top of the page. Or do
they sit there for twenty seconds at a live draft
and say, oh, Christian McCaffrey because they haven't thought about
anything that's a in and of itself. So we're starting
to put that stuff on them and figure them out caps.
At this point that's not really that much in play,
but you want to see who's spending wildly, who's taking

(52:09):
themselves out by grabbing a fifty dollars player and a
forty dollars player back to back. And then rosters at
this point really aren't in play yet. You do want
to see what people are chasing. If somebody's got two
or three top receivers, that's going to take them out
of the running for certain players later. But we're really
not worried about caps and rosters this early in the draft.
What's the next shift to happen at this point? Well,

(52:30):
the next shift is when most of the elite players
are gone. That's four to five rounds and in the draft,
and the next tiers of players are starting to be
gobbled up. The cap is now seeing a sizeable dent.
There's a lot of money that's come out of the room,
but there's still a lot of money left. At this point,
you need to be figuring out your tells even more

(52:52):
strongly because this becomes more and more important as the
draft goes on. Your game base tells, what are you
noticing about what they're doing with their bids and their
and how they're acting, and then your physical tells as well.
In this part of the draft, talent is starting to
run thin, but the elite talent is gone. And all
I can say about this part of the draft is hurry, okay, hurry,

(53:16):
because by now, hopefully you've landed somebody in the sitting
down bonus portion of the draft, and hopefully you've landed
one or two more players in the elite agro portion
of the draft. But now you have to land some
more players in this next portion of the draft because
you're still attacking tiers with some pretty good players and
this is going to make up the core of your roster.

(53:38):
You don't want to act rationally, but now is It's
not the time to say, oh, I'll get that guy later.
Oh I've got a better player I'm going to get later. No,
if you see a deal now and it fits on
your par sheet, act now. You need to hurry. During
this portion of the draft. Impact players and guys that
are going to win you titles are not going to

(53:59):
be there in the next one to two to three rounds.
They're just not going to be there, and if they are,
you're going to see an incredibly inflated price. So when
you see the shift the elite players are gone and
the next players are starting to be attacked, you know
that next mini part of the auction is kicked off,
and at that point, alarm bell should go off in
your head and you should start to feel some urgency

(54:19):
about landing more core players and attempting to do that
at a somewhat discounted rate. In the previous section of
the draft, the previous mini part of the draft, when
we're talking about elite players, there's not going to be
a lot of deals, But in this portion of the draft,
you're going to start finding some of those deals. Inexplicably,
a player is going to inexplicably, excuse me, inexplicably, a

(54:41):
player is going to go for six or eight dollars
less than they should. And you'll notice then that the
cap scarcity is starting to have an effect. So what
do we do? We run it through our five lensesnoms, bids, reads, caps, rosters,
noms bids, reads, caps, rosters. Run it through the ive lenses.
What are your nominations at this point? Well, if the

(55:04):
room is what I think the room is at this point,
people are trying to still land some of this top
level talent, and at this point I think that I
want you to be wasting your nominations. Finally, it's at
the point in the draft where maybe six, seven, eight
rounds in, you want to be wasting nominations here. You
want to be calling out players that you don't really

(55:25):
want to roster, but that you think are going to
pull maximum cap dollars from the room. You're kind of
going to be punting at this point. That's not a
hard and fast rule. You have to be able to
read the room. But at this point, in this portion
of the draft, I think, more often than not, I'm
wasting nominations and I'm letting the draft come back to
me because I've spent a sizeable amount of money and

(55:47):
i have most of my core there, and I'm just
waiting on players to come up that are going to
be a value. I don't really care who those players are.
I care about the value. So how is my bidding
working at this point, Well, I want you to be
slowing down. Previously, we were really pushing the action. We
were pushing it hard, we were pushing it fast, we
were being really aggressive because we knew there was a

(56:10):
lot of latitude above our bids because there were elite players.
But now there's not as much room to be bidding
people up in price, enforcing and don't forget that we
need to be picking our spots with the bidding here
because if we want a player, or if we think
we can end up with a player, don't forget our
buddy Matt the auctioneer telling us that more bids on

(56:30):
a player means generally it's going to be a higher price.
So don't help the price get up there. If it's
a player that you really want, so slow down. Remember
the key thing that people forget when they're in the
middle of an auction. You have to have multiple speeds.
This is a different part of the auction, so your
bidding has to be a little bit different, your timing
has to be different, and your approch has to be different.

(56:52):
And then this portion of the draft that means sometimes
you need to shut up. Sometimes you need to pass
on some deals. You can't take every deal, so sometimes
keep your damn mouse shut. This is also a good
time to play the silent sniper. Don't help those bids
get up there. If you see a deal coming, sit
there and wait until one person thinks they have that player,
and then bid them by one dollar extra and see

(57:13):
if you win them. And if not, you're in there
because you think the price is good enough for because
you want that player and it works for your strategy.
Just shut up, wait for it to end, and then
jump in into the last second. How about your reads
at this point, Well, you should really know the room
by now. If you don't know the room by now,
you haven't been working hard enough. You have to grind
that draft to figure out what people are doing. You

(57:35):
should have a piece of paper next to you that
tells you all the tendencies of the players in the
room by now, Which managers are nominating people they want,
Which managers are nominating players from the top of their sheet,
Which managers are nominating players that they don't want. You
should know all that stuff by now, and it should
be guiding your decisions and your ability to bid people up.
That's one of the easiest things you can do. This

(57:57):
player always nominates a player he likes, and he ends
up with them on his roster, or he ends up
bidding until it's way past market value before he drops out.
That is simple stuff, folks. That's simple stuff. And if
you're not keeping notes, you're not going to remember who
that is. You're not going to be able to take
advantage of it. What about the cap space at this point. Well,
now we're starting, it's starting to matter. And the big

(58:19):
thing I want you to keep track of is keeping
your hammer. Okay, you want to be near the top
of the auction at this point. Now that doesn't mean
passing on players to your detriment, but generally you're going
to need to pass on some deals. Get used to
that idea. You can't always have every deal, get your
favorite deals and then stop. Roster flexibility and cap flexibility

(58:44):
starts to come into play more and more in these rounds, seventh, eighth, ninth,
tenth rounds that we're in now, it's more important to
have your roster flexibility and your cap flexibility. Sometimes you're
gonna say, oh, that's a good deal. I want to
bid nine bucks, but would you rather have sixty eight
dollars remaining or fifty nine dollars remaining? How much of
a difference is that to your cap space? And do

(59:05):
you care about that player enough to ruin the hammer
that you currently have? More often than not, the answers no.
So you need to be very selective about what your
cap space tells you that you're allowed to do. And
how about rosters in general? You have to start thinking
about what people want. You should be able to see
who needs a quarterback. When the quarterback comes up, can

(59:25):
you bid them up? Do they really need them badly?
Do they not care? Let's say, for example, that some
girl is bidding against you for AJ Brown and she
already has Drake London. Well, does that mean that she
wants to land AJ Brown and Drake London? Or is
she bidding you up? You have to figure that out.
Does she actually want that? Now maybe you noticed before

(59:46):
that she was bidding on CD Lamb, Well this should
tell you something. This should tell you, Hey, she bid
on Ceedde Lamb. Now she's bidding on AJ Brown. Just
because she has Drake Lundon doesn't mean she's done right.
So this is important stuff that you have to be
paying attention to. Look at their roster, their cap space.
That's the lens through which you're looking at each individual play.

(01:00:07):
So here we are. I'm talking about the infinite amount
of variables. And this is just a small peak into this.
The nooms, the bids, the reads, the caps, the rosters,
all that stuff plays off each other. You have to
juxtapose it all off of each other in every possible moment.
To try to solve the infinite variables that you are
faced with. We cannot go confidently towards our dreams unless

(01:00:28):
we are constantly trying to solve those infinite variables in
our favor. So the next shift is going to happen
in the draft room when the raw dollar values start
to drop for rostered players, and the relative value in
the room means less. And what do I mean by
the relative value? Well, what that means is that wide

(01:00:49):
receiver twenty one may have gone for twenty two dollars earlier,
but now you're looking at wide receiver nineteen, and that
player may go for eleven. Because there is a cratering
of prices in the room, The relative value from players
nominated earlier in the auction to where they are now
means a whole lot less. The raw dollar values themselves

(01:01:10):
will be dropping, but that doesn't mean the value to
you is any less or any more. It just means
that the actual figures that you're paying are different now.
So you're going to see prices be lower in general. However,
the competition is still going to be really high at
this point, and you're going to notice this shift because
you're going to see that some players go for some

(01:01:31):
inexplicably low prices because people have entered what I call
get your guy mode. They've entered that portion of the
draft where they are looking at certain players that they
want to land on their roster, and they don't care
so much about the fact that you're getting a deal.
And those are the kind of players that you want
to focus in on and get your guy mode. The

(01:01:52):
people with more money than you, or as much money
than you are going to look at the players left
and the top players left and say I can land
those players. I'm going to wait on them. And while
they're waiting on them, while others with money wait to
compete for some guys who are going to be overpriced,
you're going to start picking off value right then and there.
So you've already got the core from the previous couple

(01:02:15):
of mini auctions, the hot and heavy Agro period, followed
by the Tiers two, three four period, the five or
six rounds in there. We've shifted again now to get
your guy mode, and there's going to be a handful
of players left that everyone thinks they're going to get.
But you're not going to be fooled into that. You're
not going to focus on those. You're going to take

(01:02:36):
the values that are going to be weirdly available during
this portion of the draft. You're going to get one, two,
three more players, and then all of a sudden you're
looking down at eight to eleven players on your team.
They've all been good values or at market price, and
you have used all of your skills to compile this
incredibly nice core of players without being forced into a

(01:02:57):
corner like other people are doing during this portion of
the draft. Your nominations, what are our lenses at this
point in the draft. We've got lower dollar values but
incredibly high competition. Still, don't forget that just because a player,
excuse me, just because a manager is sitting there with
thirty two dollars, that doesn't mean that they're not going
to spend twenty four dollars on a player. They might

(01:03:20):
go back to the law of loose wiring. Sometimes they're
going to do things that are against their interests. So
you can't count on the fact that just because you
have most of the money, you're going to get a deal.
Oftentimes it means the opposite. So your nominations should again
be wit and waste, wait and waste, them. Use your

(01:03:40):
kicker and D nominations. I want you to save them
to this part in the draft. Use your kicker and
D nominations to be able to punt go down your
list of players you don't want. Throw out Lad McConkey.
Throw out your kicker in D that buys you three
rounds right there. You're going to wait and waste other
people's money, and then you're going to pounce when necessary
with your bids. I want you to be mostly quiet

(01:04:02):
during this phase. Again, you're getting more and more quiet
the further and further the draft goes on. You don't
want to be opening your mouth and making a big mistake,
and you don't want to be contributing to rising prices
on players that you possibly want. However, at this point
in time, you're going to want to try to take
people out. You're going to want to pay attention. That's
the other two lenses that we're going to talk about

(01:04:22):
here in just a second. But caps and rosters try
to take people out. Look at their rosters if they're
bidding too high. If that person has thirty two dollars
and they're bidding to twenty four dollars on a player,
unless you badly need them shut up and let them
take themselves out of the draft. That just eliminated an
entire opponent that you don't have to fight with the
players for later in the draft. Now, maybe you want

(01:04:45):
to bid twenty five because you need that player, go
for it. But if you can take that person out,
do it and start to learn which players you can
aim nominations at and which players you can bid and
target for either filling their roster space or take away
their caps. This is an incredibly critical stage that you
must know everyone's cap space and rosters. It's just I

(01:05:08):
can't stress it enough. I can't overstate how important it is. Previously,
in the last couple of sections it became more and
more important, but it wasn't critical. It was something that
you had to think about caps, you had to think
about their roster space, but not really. Now we're getting
into the phase where you have to know what everyone
is doing at all times, and then you have to

(01:05:29):
start to think to yourself, how good is my roster?
Do I need to continue with my par sheet in
building out the back of my roster? Is that going
to be beneficial to me? Or aren't there a couple
players left on the board where I can possibly drop
the hammer, grab both players and forget about the rest
of my roster to one and two dollars players. Can

(01:05:49):
I wield the hammer, or as I said earlier, do
I drop the par sheet? Do I get rid of
my par sheet in favor of landing two more impact
players that you never thought you had a chance to
land earlier in the draft. That's always my goal. I
want to get to the end of this portion, the
end of this mini portion of the draft. So this
is probably the fourth or fifth mini portion of the

(01:06:11):
draft that we've noticed the inflection points have hit three
or four times, and now we're in this spot where
the competition is still really high for the last couple
of players, but it's starting to get thin and the
dollar amounts are starting to get low, and all of
a sudden you look and see, hey, I've got a
really good team. I've followed my strategy all the way through.
My team is very strong right now. It's not going
to matter for me to land Darnell Mooney at the

(01:06:34):
back of my roster. It's not going to matter for
me if I land Kamani Vidal. I'm already so strong
that all I'm going to do is take the last
two players, and I'm going to dump my par sheet
and slam all my money at those last two players
and drop the hammer. That's what I want you to
start thinking about. When other people are going to get
your guy mode, where are you going? Are you landing

(01:06:54):
more players for the back of your roster or are
you dropping the hammer. So then the final shift, the
final form of the auction, is going to be to
the end of the draft, when we have one to
three dollars players. Any remaining scraps that are on the
table are going to explode and those players are going
to go for way too much money to the players

(01:07:15):
that save too much money because they're going to try
to land those last couple of players. If you didn't
do it by dropping the hammer before they're about to
do it. And what your goal here is is to
finish before most of the other players finish. That means
you've had your choice of who you wanted in this
phase of the draft. This is going to be a
sort of modified snake when you get into this final

(01:07:35):
form of the draft. No players are going for over
six or eight dollars. Most are going between one and three.
You want to have a couple bucks here. Your nominations
here are extremely critical because if you call out the
wrong player and you only have a couple bucks two
to three dollars, and somebody can outbid you, if they're
waiting on that player or waiting on that position, and
you call them out incorrectly, you're going to lose the player.

(01:07:57):
Or if you call out somebody that nobody cares about,
you're going to get stuck with the player that you
don't want. Nominations are massively critical at this point in
the draft, and I would argue that they're never more
critical than they are near the end of the draft.
What about the other lenses, My bids, my reads, my caps,
my rosters, well reads are absolutely critical as well, because

(01:08:18):
you need to know when people are interested in certain
positions and when they are finding their interest peaked by
their behavior by their bids throughout the end of the auction,
because that can tell you whether or not your nomination
is going to be right or not. And with bidding,
always think about this. You have to be ready with
the correct bid. Sometimes you want to nominate players at

(01:08:39):
two dollars, Sometimes you want to nominate them at one
sometimes you want to let somebody else nominate them, so
you can say two because that's their max bid. You
always have to know is their max bid? Two? Is
it three? Is it four? Don't forget that if you
nominate for one, oftentimes that can become three and you
wasted two bucks. One becomes three, But if you nominate

(01:09:00):
at two, it's rarely going to go to four. So
one becomes three, but two doesn't become four as often.
So think about that. What are the cap situations telling you?
Does a certain player need a bunch of running backs still,
or they need three running backs and they need to
backup this or backup that whatever. And you know that
you can call out wide receivers, they're not going to care.

(01:09:20):
You need to look at their cap and their roster,
and essentially, at this point you're letting just about everyone
go unless there's somebody that you really want or somebody
that you find to be essential to the end of
your strategy. You have to know how to nominate and
how to bid, to walk your guys through the rain
drops so they end up on your roster. The end

(01:09:41):
stage has very little competition dollar wise, but it's still
a critical stage in the draft. If you make a
mistake and you don't land Ray Davis and then you
end up landing Keaton Mitchell. One player had a brutal
knee injury last year and has a tough time to
find the field this year. Player is second in line

(01:10:02):
and looks like Gangbusters in the preseason and could end
up being an integral part of somebody's fantasy championship. If
you fumble away Ray Davis and end up with Keaton Mitchell,
that's your problem because you weren't grinding hard enough through
the five lenses in the final form of the draft.
So you finish your draft strong. You want to come
across the finish line early. You want to get there

(01:10:24):
ahead of most of the other people in the room.
And then as you finish your draft, you take a
deep breath, and when the auction is done, you think
to yourself, what all you've gone through, what you've accomplished,
and what you can do better next year. But when
it's finished, if you really grinded your way through that
auction draft room, if you've played your hardest, if you've

(01:10:47):
looked at the game theory and all the lenses and
all the layers of everything that you've done. You should
be exhausted because you've combined dozens of smaller skills and
edges and advantages through the entire auction to produce an
elite auction result. And why is that? Because your prep

(01:11:08):
before the draft was the best. Because you remember to
always have a reason for everything you did throughout the draft,
to follow the flow of the draft to see when
it's shifting, to make well timed bids in nominations. You
looked at the mini auctions, the parts of the draft.
You were always attempting to put maximum pressure on your
opponents with surgical actions, forcing mistakes from them, using your

(01:11:33):
tough mindset to push forward, to figure out when to
bid people up when that type of strategy was necessary,
to wait when patience was key, to nominate the right
player for the right time and the right portion of
the draft. To chase perfect nominations, perfect bids, perfect prices
for your build. You've layered your instincts in your intuition

(01:11:57):
that you build up through the prep and through the
study of the craft, to use human tells, to use
game based telts to weave together the perfect blend of attacking, waiting, striking, reading, solving,
and patience to produce a tapestry of beautiful auction success

(01:12:19):
that nobody can touch, because nobody but you in that
draft room can master the infinite variables like someone who
possesses these skills, like you, who now possess this knowledge
and these skills and the skill set that very few
in the world possess. It's all in front of you
right now. Go and take it thereas fullhearts. There's nothing

(01:12:48):
more that needs to be said. Choose to be great,
Go confidently in the direction of your dreams, and live
the life you have imagined. I wish this for each
and everyone one of you. It's been my pleasure being here.
And now the auction Brief is adjourned, and I am out.

(01:13:08):
The Auction Brief is adjourned. That'll do it for this
week's episode. See you next time on the Auction Brief.