ESPN publishes their auction prices for 10-team, 16-player, $200 budget leagues on their website, but they don’t publish prices for other sizes of leagues. However, if you create a different sized league ESPN’s draft software will show different suggested prices, so they have some method of creating new prices for different leagues. But whatever method they are using is extremely flawed.

Specifically, their suggested values don’t add up to the total amount of money available! For a 12-team, 16-player, $200 budget league the prices for the top 192 players should add up to $2,400. However, I used ESPN’s mock draft lobby to write down the values of the first 192 players and they added up to over $2,600! I did the same for an 8-league team, and the top 128 players added up to $1760, despite only $1600 available to spend - and that’s without mentioning ESPN suggests spending $2+ on 143 players, which is 15 more players than can fit on rosters!

So my two questions are (1) What’s wrong with ESPN that they don’t use the simplest sanity check? (2) Since most people in the leagues I’m playing against will use these inherently overvalued prices as their guide, how do I adjust my drafting strategy to cope? If I sit back and wait for everyone else to spend all their money I’ll end up with 16 $~10 players for $5 each and a bunch of cash left over, which isn’t going to help me any.

And because I found it interesting, I attached a picture of the difference in prices for each player between the 12-team league and the 10-team league. For some reason the $20-30 players only had a couple bucks added to their prices, while everyone else above $5 got $4+ added to their value, with a maximum of $9. That doesn’t seem right to me either, but maybe the curves just happen to match there…

I forgot to mention the 10-team league prices make complete sense, adding up to $2000, with a reasonable number of players at each position.

James - 28 August 2014 12:44 PM

So my two questions are (1) What’s wrong with ESPN that they don’t use the simplest sanity check? (2) Since most people in the leagues I’m playing against will use these inherently overvalued prices as their guide, how do I adjust my drafting strategy to cope? If I sit back and wait for everyone else to spend all their money I’ll end up with 16 $~10 players for $5 each and a bunch of cash left over, which isn’t going to help me any.

Re: (1) I can’t say for sure what is wrong with ESPN’s calculations, but most likely it is a combination of rounding (because they show everything in even dollars) and quantization (because the minimum bid is $1). I have made enough of my own auction values, and vacillated on methodology enough times, to know that it is easy to get things wrong if you aren’t careful. ESPN and Yahoo don’t want to show estimates that A is worth $1.50 and B is worth $0.50 - they want whole numbers for whatever reason. So rather than a combined value of $2 for those players, ESPN/Yahoo might come up with $1, $2 or $3, depending on how they approach the rounding/minimum problem.

(IMO the only clean thing to do is not round your estimates. Yes, you will get players estimated at $0.10 when the minimum bid is $1. So what? Just because it’s below the minimum bid doesn’t make a $0.10 player any more valuable.)

Re: (2) There is no universal answer for this adjustment. If you are so inclined you can take ESPN’s raw statistical projections (and maybe incorporate others as well!) and your league’s scoring, and calculate your own auction values. Because if you don’t trust ESPN’s translation of a player’s production value to auction value, why do you trust their calculation of production value in the first place?

But if you want a very simple approach, you can implicitly trust ESPN’s relative player values and just multiply all of them by 2400/2600 (the ratio of available auction money to the sum of ESPN’s values). You will get values below $1, but per my response to point (1), so what? Besides, hopefully the point of doing this is to find players who are worth well more than $1 that you can get cheaply - for that purpose it doesn’t matter if you are off a little bit due to rounding and scaling.

As for your observation that player values don’t adjust smoothly as league size changes… that actually makes a lot of sense. The distribution of talent is non-linear. As replacement level rises (i.e. league size decreases) top players become relatively more valuable compared to other players - this is not intuitive to most people - and the opposite occurs when replacement level falls (league size increases). Conversely, players who were comfortably above replacement in larger leagues may become worthless in smaller ones. At the same time, there is also a non-uniform distribution of talent across positions. So sometimes you get effects where (say) the 8th and 9th best TEs are about the same, but the 10th best is far worse; if the same is not true at say QB (8-10 are all about the same) then increasing from 8 to 10 teams will tend to make TEs more valuable relative to QBs. As league size changes replacement level at each position can change in unpredictable ways, which means auction values change in unpredictable ways as well.

I realize this is a little late for your draft probably, but hopefully you will still find my response to be useful for the future!

mcbrown - 03 September 2014 11:21 AM

James - 28 August 2014 12:44 PM

So my two questions are (1) What’s wrong with ESPN that they don’t use the simplest sanity check? (2) Since most people in the leagues I’m playing against will use these inherently overvalued prices as their guide, how do I adjust my drafting strategy to cope? If I sit back and wait for everyone else to spend all their money I’ll end up with 16 $~10 players for $5 each and a bunch of cash left over, which isn’t going to help me any.

Re: (2) There is no universal answer for this adjustment ... But if you want a very simple approach, you can implicitly trust ESPN’s relative player values and just multiply all of them by 2400/2600 (the ratio of available auction money to the sum of ESPN’s values).

If I do that I’ll be outbid on almost every player until everyone runs out of money, leaving only a few middling options left for me to buy.

For instance, if the top player is valued at $70, you say I should value him ~$65 (=70*2400/2600). Well someone is certainly going to see the ESPN value and bid up on him lest I get a “deal”, and that will keep happening for a while. It’s not until around the $15 players the adjusted values are within a dollar or two, which is also about the time people will run out of money from overbidding, but it’s not an effective strategy to build a team entirely out of the 60th-80th best players. That will almost certainly leave me with too much value on my bench, and possibly money left over. I’ve also tried creating my own values, but my top prices come out much lower than the suggested values, leading to the same problem.

Eventually I decided to use the same ordinal list but created my own value curve that had the same number of non-minimum bid ($1) players and the same values for the top players (mid 70s for my 14 team league). That resulted in a curve with similar values for the top 45, but $3-4 lower values for the next 100, before matching with $1 players. In the end I think that worked out very well - it results in a extreme stars and scrubs strategy as I was competively bidding for the best players, with an aim to get 3-4, but could rely on snagging a couple of the $10-15 for cheap as everyone ran out of money, and then filled out the team with $1 players.

Yeah, that’s pretty reasonable. The most important thing in any auction draft is to not leave a bunch of money on the table, and “stars and scrubs” is an ideal strategy for football IMO.