Salary Cap League Strategy (1 Viewer)

[Q-Bert]

So, my long time keep four league is transitioning to a dynasty this year. Our commish is a lawyer who seems to have made it his mission to design the most complex set of rules possible. The general outline of the league is that we have unlimited rosters, players can be signed to contracts of up to five years, have a salary cap of $167 (don't ask, I have no idea), and salaries will be set by an initial auction this summer.

The main complexity comes in the initial auction. Because we are transitioning from a keep four league and there was considerable resistance to simply starting fresh, we have a complex franchise/exemption process for the initial auction.

Each team can franchise one player. That players salary is set to the veteran minimum, which is determined based on his statistics from the previous season. In general, the veteran minimum will result in the top tier players being franchised at an incredible bargain.

Then, each team is granted three "exemptions". The exemptions allow an owner to "pull back" a player from their current roster at the veteran minimum if another owner outbids them for one of the players currently on their roster. For instance, my top three players are Reggie Bush, Larry Fitzgerald, and Darrell Jackson. If I were to franchise Bush and another owner placed the highest bid on Larry Fitzgerald, I could pull back Darrell Jackson at his veteran minimum. I could then do this two more times during the auction. If you place the winning bid on one of the players currently on your roster you give up one of your exemptions.

The exemption system was put into place to maintain the integrity of our former keep four system (1 franchise player +3 exemption = 4 keepers).

The things that I am struggling with are:

How much of my cap space should I spend during the initial auction?

I feel like I should stay about 10% under the cap to allow for free agent pickups during the season and trade flexibility.

How do you assign auction values for a salary cap dynasty league?

All of the articles discussing auction values follow the general process of determining the total cap space available in the league and dividing that by the total points above baseline to come up with a dollar value per VBD number. But, this is a dynasty league and I really don't think it would be a good idea to try to do projections for the next 3-5 years. The ability to have variable length contracts also messes with this a bit. I don't think much of Shaun Alexander as a dynasty player right now but if I could sign him to a one or two year deal then he does have value.

In general how long should player contracts be?

I can see signing a guy like Fitzgerald to the maximum five year deal. He's young and a receiver. But what about Steven Jackson, or LT, or Hines Ward. This is probably something that needs to be decided on a case by case basis.

Any other questions I should have that I am missing?

Any thoughts the pool has on strategies for this type of league, or for dynasty leagues in general, would be appreciated.

 

[coolnerd]

How much of my cap space should I spend during the initial auction?

Tough to answer w/o knowing the details of your league. In my experience, I would argue to spend pretty close to cap, but if there are penalties for dropping players or if placing a players on IR, I would factor that in.

How do you assign auction values for a salary cap dynasty league?

Yes, I would make an attempt to, but once enough player are won at auction you will need to adjust your values.

In general how long should player contracts be?

Your answer is probably correct. There is a thread and/or article floating around about average lenghts of player careers. Also, see answer to first questions. The difficulty in acquiring/dropping players should factor.

Any other questions I should have that I am missing?

Just make sure that you leave yourself the flexibility to acquire players. Not looking at your rules, I have found that contracts caps are often the most difficult to get around and that other owners will forget about. Also, value becomes a very different animal in these types of league than even a normal dynasty. There will be people who make what seems to be a bad trade becaue they need cap/years space.

Any thoughts the pool has on strategies for this type of league, or for dynasty leagues in general, would be appreciated.

 

[Q-Bert]

How much of my cap space should I spend during the initial auction?

Tough to answer w/o knowing the details of your league. In my experience, I would argue to spend pretty close to cap, but if there are penalties for dropping players or if placing a players on IR, I would factor that in.

There is a penalty. Players who are cut have 1/2 of their salary (rounded up to the nearest whole number) count against your cap for the year they are cut. If they have more than one year remaining on their contract the cap hit is cut in half for each year. For instance, if you had a player signed to an $16/year contract and cut him with 3 years left he would count $8 the year he was cut, $4 the next year, and $2 the last year. Players who appear on the NFL injury report at any time during the season can be placed on IR. Once on IR they do not count against the cap, however they must remain on IR for the remainder of the season. Each team has two IR slots. Players who retire, die, or are cut by their NFL teams can be dropped from your fantasy roster with no cap implications.

How do you assign auction values for a salary cap dynasty league?

Yes, I would make an attempt to, but once enough player are won at auction you will need to adjust your values.

I understand but never having participated in an auction before I am not even really sure how to start. My current plan is to rank the players and then use something like the Draft Dominator to see what auction values it assigns to RB1, WR13, etc. based on my league variables. This seems like it would be at least a decent starting point. My main problem is that I am so used to creating projections, determining value, and then drafting based on best player available. This league seems to require much more "by the gut" decision making. 1. Rank the players based on subjective understanding of next 3-5 years.

2. See what auction value footballguys places on the corresponding rank positions for redraft.

3. Adjust based on where I think the actually major drops in value are.

4. Adjust based on contract length I am willing to offer.

By the way, thanks for the helpful response.

 

[coolnerd]

How much of my cap space should I spend during the initial auction?

Tough to answer w/o knowing the details of your league. In my experience, I would argue to spend pretty close to cap, but if there are penalties for dropping players or if placing a players on IR, I would factor that in.

There is a penalty. Players who are cut have 1/2 of their salary (rounded up to the nearest whole number) count against your cap for the year they are cut. If they have more than one year remaining on their contract the cap hit is cut in half for each year. For instance, if you had a player signed to an $16/year contract and cut him with 3 years left he would count $8 the year he was cut, $4 the next year, and $2 the last year. Players who appear on the NFL injury report at any time during the season can be placed on IR. Once on IR they do not count against the cap, however they must remain on IR for the remainder of the season. Each team has two IR slots. Players who retire, die, or are cut by their NFL teams can be dropped from your fantasy roster with no cap implications.

How do you assign auction values for a salary cap dynasty league?

Yes, I would make an attempt to, but once enough player are won at auction you will need to adjust your values.

I understand but never having participated in an auction before I am not even really sure how to start. My current plan is to rank the players and then use something like the Draft Dominator to see what auction values it assigns to RB1, WR13, etc. based on my league variables. This seems like it would be at least a decent starting point. My main problem is that I am so used to creating projections, determining value, and then drafting based on best player available. This league seems to require much more "by the gut" decision making. 1. Rank the players based on subjective understanding of next 3-5 years.

2. See what auction value footballguys places on the corresponding rank positions for redraft.

3. Adjust based on where I think the actually major drops in value are.

4. Adjust based on contract length I am willing to offer.

By the way, thanks for the helpful response.

From the information you have given me, it looks like there is a pretty heavy price to pay for speculating. The 10% goal seems reasonable under the system you guys have seet up. I would do the same with cap years also. Initial auctions are educated guesses at best. The figure that will set everything is number for top RBs. Not sure of scoring system, but 30%-35% of total room would not surprise me. The good news with auctions is that you can try to build a squad the is deep at good prices versus a real top heavy squad. with every variation in between.

 

[Q-Bert]

From the information you have given me, it looks like there is a pretty heavy price to pay for speculating. The 10% goal seems reasonable under the system you guys have seet up. I would do the same with cap years also. Initial auctions are educated guesses at best. The figure that will set everything is number for top RBs. Not sure of scoring system, but 30%-35% of total room would not surprise me. The good news with auctions is that you can try to build a squad the is deep at good prices versus a real top heavy squad. with every variation in between.

The 30%-35% seems like a good starting spot. That would give LT an auction value of ~$50 which seems reasonable.

 

[brewer]

Players who appear on the NFL injury report at any time during the season can be placed on IR. Once on IR they do not count against the cap, however they must remain on IR for the remainder of the season. Each team has two IR slots. Players who retire, die, or are cut by their NFL teams can be dropped from your fantasy roster with no cap implications.

Woah, you can and should exploit this rule as most everyone hits the injury report at some point.That's a crazy rule in my opinion.

 

[Q-Bert]

Players who appear on the NFL injury report at any time during the season can be placed on IR. Once on IR they do not count against the cap, however they must remain on IR for the remainder of the season. Each team has two IR slots. Players who retire, die, or are cut by their NFL teams can be dropped from your fantasy roster with no cap implications.

Woah, you can and should exploit this rule as most everyone hits the injury report at some point.That's a crazy rule in my opinion.

Absolutely, any time a player who is underperforming his salary is on the injury report I will put him on IR. We are limited to two IR slots though and the player must remain on IR for the remainder of the season.

 

[Q-Bert]

So, I feel fairly confident in how I have set my initial auction values. The procedure that I have followed is:

1. Rank my top 75 overall players.

2. Combine my list with Bloom and Pasquino's top 75 dynasty ranks from footballguys and take the average.

3. Assign approximately 35% of the salary cap to the top player (in this case $55 to LT).

4. Assign auction values as I move down the list using my intuition as to where the drop offs should be and which players are about equal in value.

Now what I am trying to figure out is how to adjust the values dynamically as Dodds suggests in his Perfect Auction article from the preseason:

During the auction, adjust undrafted player values dynamically based on previous bids in this auction. (This is very hard to do manually, but we do this automatically with our Draft Dominator software). This is very important to make sure you are not overbidding during the draft. A player's dynamic value can change significantly during the draft if massive over-bidding/under-bidding occurs.

Now it would be great if I could just use the draft dominator to do this but I really don't see how that is possible in a dynasty league. My ideal solution would be for footballguys to come out with a dynasty version of the Draft Dominator that allows me to adjust the rankings of players without having to try to adjust their projections to get them to fit my rankings.I really need to be able to adjust the auction values for two reasons:

1. Because of our unique franchise/exemption process for our initial auction there will be many players signed to well below market value contracts (for instance the maximum contract for a franchise/exemption player is $20, getting LT for 20 bucks when this exercise has shown his value to be $55 is a steal).

2. To allow me to reassess value during the auction.

My thoughts on how to do #1 are:

1. Come up with my best guess for which players will be franchised/exempted

2. Determine their veteran minimum contract.

3. Subtract their total salaries from the total league salary cap (i.e. $167 x 12 teams).

4. Divide ther remaining salary cap space by the number of teams to come up with the new average salary cap.

5. Remove them from my ranking list.

6. Assign the top player remaining on my list an auction value of ~35% of the new average salary cap.

7. Assign auction values as I move down the list using my intuition as to where the drop offs should be and which players are about equal in value.

This seems to work reasonable well for my pre-auction preparation but as Dodds says this would be extremely difficult to do manually on the fly. I could see using excel to keep a running tab on what the top player remaining should be valued at and then just eyeballing the rest of my list based on that.

What I really keep coming back to is that it sure would be nice if footballguys put out a Dynasty version of the Draft Dominator. Hint, hint.

 

[Q-Bert]

4. Assign auction values as I move down the list using my intuition as to where the drop offs should be and which players are about equal in value.

7. Assign auction values as I move down the list using my intuition as to where the drop offs should be and which players are about equal in value.

Does anybody who is more experienced in both auction drafting and excel have any suggestions for how to automate this step. Maybe something like each step down the rank list should correspond to about a 1-2% drop in auction value. This would be a little easier to automate then. For exampleRank...Auction value1........=.35*average salary cap2........=.99*rank 1 value3........=.99*rank 2 value....75.......=.99*rank 74 valueMaybe I'll play around with this and see if it works.