Practice makes perfect. While it’s impossible to have the perfect fantasy football draft, preparation is key. For those in leagues with auction drafts, it can be challenging to truly practice. It’s far more difficult to find an auction mock draft where managers take it seriously. Fortunately, I found one! And now, I come to you with my findings.
To do your own mock (snake drafts only for now), head over to PFSN’s Fantasy Football Mock Draft Simulator.
Early June 1QB PPR Auction Mock Draft Report
I love auction drafts. They are superior to snake drafts in every conceivable way. The only real downside is they take longer, but we’re talking about an extra 30-60 minutes in August for four months of fun. It’s not a huge issue.
The bigger issue is the barrier to entry. Auctions are daunting. You could be a 10-year fantasy football veteran and feel in over your head in your first auction.
To give you an idea of the difficulty auctions present, yours truly was in over his head in this auction. I won’t bury the lede. This was an awful performance. Now, to be fair, it’s June. No one has a firm grasp on player valuation yet, making it even more difficult to navigate an auction draft, as I went into this without any solid baseline of what to expect.
I join at least four to five leagues with auction drafts every year. Unsurprisingly, the draft of the first league tends to be my weakest. The others get progressively better.
A ton of value can be gained from doing an auction draft where everyone is trying their hardest. Each one helps you better understand what to expect in the next one. Ideally, the way to practice for future auctions is not to do real drafts for leagues that count with money on the line. Instead, we’d want to do mocks, just like we do for our snake drafts.
The inherent problem with auction mocks is that it’s exceedingly difficult to find 12 people who are willing to hunker down for at least an hour or so to complete a reasonable portion of an auction mock with everyone taking it mostly seriously.
A snake mock can be done on a whim. Beginning in July, I run them semi-daily in the PFSN Discord. They fill pretty quickly and are typically done in about 30 minutes. It’s not that easy to do an auction mock. Plus, we don’t have the benefit of using simulators. Perhaps with the advancement of AI, we’ll be able to do this in the future, but right now, you cannot emulate a real auction with bots.
Fortunately, Adam Segel from fffaceoff.com is kind enough to run auction mocks throughout the summer. He tweets out a Sleeper link, and it’s first come, first served. I plan to do as many of these as I can. Shout out to Adam.
🚨FIRST 1QB AUCTION MOCK OF 2025🚨
Redraft | PPR
Join me this Friday at 8:30 pm EST for the first 1QB auction mock of the year!#FantasyFootball#Auction@FFfaceoffhttps://t.co/rT6oyAA3f1
1/2— Adam Segal (@AlwaysAuctions) June 4, 2025
The first one he ran for the upcoming redraft season, which I participated in, was on June 6, and it was a 1QB PPR draft with 1 QB, 3 WR, 2 RB, 1 TE, and 2 Flex.
Not everyone stuck around for the entire thing. We had someone go on autopick early. Auction mocks will never be perfect, but there was certainly enough here to learn some things.
Don’t Be Afraid To Spend Early in Auction Drafts
It can be scary to start dropping money early. There are so many players available, and the market hasn’t really been set yet.
Each auction is its own ecosystem. The baseline prices for the elite WR1s or RB1s in one auction could be $5-$10 more or less than in the next. It can be difficult to dive headfirst into uncertainty, especially when it comes to the first one you’re doing. Embrace it.
The value in this mock came early. The very first player nominated was CeeDee Lamb. He went for $40. Saquon Barkley went fourth for $42. Justin Jefferson went for $46. Those all turned out to be very good values.
By comparison, later on, Jahmyr Gibbs went for $67, De’Von Achane for $51, and Christian McCaffrey for $58.
I started strong and won Drake London for $37 and Puka Nacua, also for $37. Having spent $74 within the first 10 picks of the draft, I hesitated to spend more, even when my instincts told me there were good prices out there.
Some of the major errors I made were passing on Malik Nabers at $37, letting Josh Jacobs go for $32, and bowing out of Ladd McConkey at $35. I also let Rashee Rice go for $30 despite valuing all these players higher than their cost.
One mistake fantasy managers often make when looking back at draft results is assuming they would’ve gotten these players had they bid more. It’s entirely possible that my bidding on them would’ve just resulted in someone else getting them for a higher price. That’s important, though.
Quickly Diagnose When You’re in a Value Pocket
What is a value pocket? Auction drafts ebb and flow. Given the uncertain nature of each group of managers and how much the order of players impacts prices, no two auctions are the same. But one thing is certain in every auction: there will be overpays and undervalues.
Typically, the overpays and undervalues come in bunches. Imagine an auction where bidding opens up hot out of the gate when everyone has a bunch of money. The first 15-20 players go for more than their expected value. Since auctions are a zero-sum game, if some players go for too much, others will inevitably go for too little. The value always comes back around.
In this particular auction mock draft, there was a value pocket early. I dipped my hand into it, securing London and Nacua at great value. The mistake I made was taking my hand out before it ended.
I let the aforementioned players go. Then, since there were so many undervalues early on, everyone had excess money. As we got to the middle portion of the draft with the top players gone, people spent more than they should on the lesser players.
My third purchase was Jalen Hurts at $19. In past years, my approach in auctions would always be to leverage the fact that I don’t have to draft a player in every round to use the money saved from not spending on a QB to get a better RB or WR.
Over the past year or two, my strategy has flipped. Instead, I want to get an elite QB for $20 or less (if I can), and trust in my ability to leverage value at other positions to make up the deficit.
I was able to do the first part, but aside from London and Nacua, I utterly failed at the second part. As players kept going for more than I thought they were worth (and, to be clear, I don’t know at this point if I was even correct in my assessment), I found myself in the worst possible position you can find yourself in an auction draft.
Don’t Get Caught With Too Much Money in Auctions
However bad you think overspending is in an auction, underspending is far worse. If you overpay for elite players, at least you have a foundation of elite players.
We’ve all seen the person who decides to buy McCaffrey, Derrick Henry, and Ja’Marr Chase. Then he gets one more strong player like, say, Terry McLaurin, before realizing he’s out of money and has to backfill the rest of his starting lineup with sub-$5 players.
That’s bad. But it’s nowhere near as bad as what I did.
This draft mostly disbanded once everyone had their starting lineups filled. So, I didn’t stick around to draft a bench against bots. But I already know how this story would have gone if I did.
I would have a starting lineup that lacked firepower beyond my big three players. My WR3 was Tetairoa McMillan. My RBs were the entire New England Patriots and Pittsburgh Steelers backfields (TreVeyon Henderson and Rhamondre Stevenson; Jaylen Warren and Kaleb Johnson). I also got Michael Pittman Jr. at a steal for $2.
All of that is great, but then I had about $50 left and no one to spend it on.
Imagine if this roster had Rice and Tee Higgins, for example. And then instead of the entire Patriots backfield, it had James Cook or Alvin Kamara. Sure, the bench would be weak, but that’s what we want in an auction — a stacked starting lineup.
Instead, I didn’t spend when I should have and paid the price. I may have wound up with the deepest team in the league, but that does me no favors when my bench is smashing everyone else’s benches. I want the points in my starting lineup. Lesson learned.
Final Thoughts on an Early Auction Mock Draft
As a reminder, this mock auction draft was conducted in early June. Like most of you, I won’t do any drafts that count for at least two months. Player values will shift considerably over that time as well.
But having dipped my feet into an auction, I already feel like I have a head start on my prep compared to previous years, where I had no ability to do any mocks and had to learn on the fly.
If you’re an auction drafter and can’t find your way into a mock, my continued participation and reporting on these can be the next best thing. I will do more, and I will bring you all with me on this journey to the 2025 fantasy football season.