The case for a salary cap draft

A few weeks ago, the commissioner of my long-running fantasy football league — this will be year 11 — raised the possibility of a salary cap draft. After several days researching, asking around, and mulling it over, I gathered my thoughts and made the case for a salary cap draft ahead of the league vote. I’ve adapted the write-up that I sent to my league for any other team owners like me out there who care too much about this stuff and really want to convince their league to make the jump.

How a salary cap draft works

I’ll start with a quick explainer for anyone who hasn’t read up or done a mock salary cap draft, also referred to as an "auction” draft. Once the draft kicks off, each team owner, one at a time, nominates a player for bidding, setting an initial bid. Once a player is nominated, all team owners have the opportunity to bid on that player. Each team owner has a budget (this can vary, but let’s say it’s $200) to fill out their roster. Each owner must retain enough money to bid $1 for each roster spot, which determines your max bid at any given point (e.g. if you have $50 left and 10 roster spots to fill, you could bid at most $41).

Now for the meat of this post. The TLDR is that I am in favor of a salary cap draft because it increases the flexibility and strategy afforded to team owners. Below I’ll go through my pros in detail and also address a few cons of the salary cap format.

You get the players you want

Make no mistake, this is the most important advantage of a salary cap draft over snake. There is no randomized draft position, so everyone starts at the same level. If you covet a player and value him more than anyone else in the league, you can draft that player! You can just bid the most. The same can’t be said in a snake draft. For example, if you love Jonathan Taylor and have to have him but you’re drafting in the back half of the first round in a snake draft, you’re out of luck. In a salary cap draft, on the other hand, if you know JT is your key to the ’ship, you can outbid the league for Johnny Touchdown.

As a thought experiment, consider the actual NFL draft. It should not be an auction because the point is to allow the worst teams to gain an advantage by drafting high so that the league has parody. Of course the snake format partially offsets this, but not fully. History shows that record-breaking player seasons (think #1 draft pick) make fantasy champions. So should a coin flip that lands you drafting #10 determine your fate? An auction draft is market-based, and since everyone has the same bidding power or cap space, so to speak, it is more like NFL free agency. Totally level playing field. The league is your oyster — go get your team captain, go get your championship.

More room for strategy

This is arguably the most fun reason to switch to a salary cap draft. It introduces a wider variety of strategies. For example, one owner can spend $180 on Ja’Marr Chase, CMC, and Mahomes five minutes into the draft while another owner sits patiently, calculator in hand, grabbing undervalued “mid-round” guys to land a roster with great value across the board. I won’t go into other examples of strategy — that could be a standalone post itself — but I am confident each of your league mates will have a lot of fun deciding how to go about draft night.

What positions do you like more than the market? What players do you know the league will undervalue? What big name players do you not want but will nominate anyway so that someone else overpays? Now you’re starting to imagine the possibilities.

High effort league, high effort draft

This one gets at the ethos of your league. I absolutely would not recommend suggesting a salary cap draft for your office league. This is for long-running leagues, ones with hefty buy-in, ones with highly anticipated destination drafts — leagues where there is a high expectation for effort. For a salary cap draft, you have to do your research. Yes, there are estimated bidding prices to use as a crutch, but you better prepare if you want to end the night satisfied with your roster.

In fairness, ESPN/Yahoo do have autodraft bots for salary cap drafts, but it’s one thing to draft best-player-available (BPA) based on site rankings and a whole other thing to have the auto bidder shell out $25 for Justin Tucker before you have an RB2 just because the algorithm fills starting positions first. If your league is a long-running, sacred tradition, owners should be disincentivized from autodrafting.

Draft night blunders

Finally, strategy aside, part of the fun of fantasy football are those priceless, that-was-the-stupidest-thing-ever moments on draft night. Back in 2013, one owner in my league drafted rookie Broncos RB Montee Ball in the first round probably 30 picks before his ADP. This year I would love to see someone pay $10 for Ben Roethlisberger or spend serious draft capital collecting a few viable options at D/ST.

Cons: why you might not want salary cap

First, no more trading draft picks. Not much gets me excited more than the idea of wheeling and dealing draft picks so that I can get out of draft spots that I view as low value into those loaded stretches of my board. It’s when I can pretend I’m Eric DeCosta or Ozzie Newsome. But to be honest, no one has been answering my calls for years, and I can’t even remember making a draft pick trade, sadly.

Second, maybe there’s something to be said for the status quo, the tradition. Back in middle school (and I’ll be honest here, high school) when I used to rip out at least a dozen mock drafts per season, I wandered into a few mock auction draft rooms and felt lost. Snake draft is the OG, and so what if it can have a bit more luck than a salary cap draft, that’s just part of the game. Personally, though, I’d rather innovate than be stuck in our ways.

Third, maybe you think you can get actually get more hidden value with your board against a snake board by reaching down (e.g. grabbing player #45 who you covet at pick 25) whereas in an auction you can’t actually “steal” because once you nominate that player, your secret is out and copy cats can jump in on the bidding. I think this is partially valid, but I don’t think it outweighs the benefit of having a shot at any player you want. Plus, you could argue the delta between your dollar-based player valuations and ESPN’s projected bids can unearth more value than the difference between your draft board and ESPN’s projected snake draft board.

Food for thought

Read this, do your own research, sit on it for a day, stir the debate in your league group chat, etc.

My expectation is that the salary cap draft format will be (1) more fun, which is why I love fantasy football in the first place, and (2) more skill-based — I am confident betting on myself, and you should be too. If you need help convincing your league mates, remind them that you can always vote to go back to snake next year if the salary cap flops. Anecdotally, I’ve read and heard a lot of people passionately arguing in favor of salary cap drafts, which I haven’t seen for snake drafts. For serious fantasy football leagues, I’ve yet to see anything along the lines of “we tried an auction draft but didn’t like it.” If you are a serious fantasy league, I think you should give it a shot.

The vote

My league has had some passionate rules/format debates in the past, namely Yahoo versus ESPN (I may write another post on that later), but this was the ugliest and most personal to date. The vote came in tied 6-6 (we needed 7 votes to make the switch), which triggered an emotional resignation by our commissioner, followed by a shocking last minute vote flip to salary cap by a team owner who had stayed pretty quiet in the debate. So this year we are testing out the salary cap format — more on how it goes after the season.

I’d love to hear any other arguments for or against and any stories from people in salary cap leagues. DM me on Twitter or jump in the comments on Reddit.

Thanks for reading.