What every player is worth in your auction

The arithmetic runs in five steps, and you can check each one. First, the room holds teams times budget. Second, one dollar is set aside for every roster spot in the league, because nobody can be bought for less than the minimum bid and that money is spoken for before anyone is nominated. Third, the starting seats are counted across the whole league from the lineup you set, with each flex seat going to whichever eligible position still has the best player unseated. Fourth, the last starter at each position sets that position's line, and a player's value is what he projects above that man. Fifth, whatever is left after the dollar reserves is split across the pool in proportion to those values, rounded to whole dollars, with the rounding remainder handed out largest fraction first so the board adds up to the room's money exactly rather than to something near it.

Those five steps are the Formula setting in the Pricing row above the board. The board does not open on them. It opens on Market, which runs one more step on top of the five, and the section below spells out exactly what that step is and why it is there.

Why the last starter, and not the best player

The reason to pay for a player is that you cannot get his production anywhere else. In a twelve-team league that starts one tight end, the twelfth best tight end is free in the sense that matters: somebody at that level will be available with your last few dollars whatever happens. So the tight end you are actually considering is only worth the gap between him and that man, not his whole projection. Do the same at every position and something useful falls out on its own. Positions do not get a fixed slice of the budget here. A position's share of the money is exactly its share of the value, so a year where three tight ends are miles clear of the rest moves real money to tight ends, and a year where the position is flat moves it away. Nothing in this page says "spend 60% on running backs", because no such rule survives contact with a specific set of projections.

What is not on this board

Kickers and defences are not priced here, and the reason is honest rather than tidy: the projection sources behind these values cover quarterbacks, running backs, receivers and tight ends, and we will not invent a number for positions we cannot show our working on. In practice this costs you nothing. Both go for the minimum bid in almost every room, and both roster spots are already paid for by the dollar this board reserves for every seat in the league, so the money left to split across the players we can price is right either way.

The long tail of $1 players

Most of the board is $1, and that is the honest answer rather than a failure to be precise. Once you are past the starters plus a handful of genuine upgrades, players stop being distinguishable by projection at all: the gap between the fortieth receiver and the sixtieth is smaller than the disagreement between the sources that projected them. In a real room those players go for a dollar, and the reason is the same one this page gives. What that means at the table is that your last several roster spots are free, so the money you are guarding for them is money you can spend early.

Market and Formula, and what flattening is

Two settings sit in the Pricing row above the board, and Market is the one it opens on. Formula is the arithmetic just described with nothing added: the whole surplus split in strict proportion to value over the last starter. It is internally correct and it is steeper at the top than any room you will ever sit in. On a twelve-team board with $200 budgets the formula puts about $103 on the best player in the pool. Ask anyone who has run that auction what the best player went for and the answer comes back somewhere between $60 and $70.

Rooms behave that way for a reason, and it is not ignorance. A manager who has spent half a budget on one player still has fourteen or fifteen spots to fill out of what is left, and the fear of that is real enough to stop the bidding on the very best players earlier than a proportional model expects. The money does not vanish. It comes back out lower down, where a full room of managers is still holding cash and the next player is only slightly worse than the last one. Prices at the top come in, prices in the middle go up, and the board spreads.

Market mode reproduces that spread with one operation you can do on paper. Take each player's dollars above the $1 floor, raise them to the power 0.625, and split the same pot in proportion to the results. Raising numbers to a power below one squashes big ones harder than small ones, which is exactly the shape of what a room does. Everything else in the five steps runs unchanged: the same pot, the same whole-dollar rounding by largest fraction, the same $1 floor underneath everybody. So a market board still adds up to teams times budget to the dollar, nobody is priced under the minimum bid, a player with nothing over the last starter is still $1, and the order never moves. Somebody who was worth more is still worth more, by less. The tier lines redraw around whichever board you are looking at, because a tier here is a dollar cliff and the cliffs move when the prices do.

The exponent is a stated choice, not a market measurement, and we would rather say so than let it look like a finding. We hold no record of what real auction rooms paid for anybody, so nothing here is fitted to real bids. What we did was pick the power that lands the top of a twelve-team $200 board inside the $65 to $72 range experienced auction players report, and write it into assets/auction-values.js?v=7219ce561ad0 as one named constant that anyone can read. What it changes is the shape of the board, not the ranking. And if you would rather see the arithmetic with nothing done to it, tap Formula: the board and its tier lines rebuild instantly from the pure proportional split, and the Copy shareable link button hands over a link carrying whichever of the two you are looking at.

These are values, not a prediction of what your room will do

Even flattened, a board is not a forecast of one particular auction. Rooms run hot early, when everyone still has a full budget and nobody wants to be the manager who spent nothing, and they run cold in the middle, when the money is thinner than people expected and genuinely good players go for less than they are worth. Which way yours breaks depends on the twelve people in it. This page tells you what a player is worth to a lineup, and in market mode roughly where a normal room puts him; it cannot tell you what the person bidding against you will do next. Use the gap between the two. If a player is $40 here and the bidding is at $52, you are not being outbid, you are being handed the rest of the board.

Keepers, inflation and the things this cannot see

Two adjustments this page cannot make for you. If your league keeps players at a discount, every dollar those keepers did not cost is still in the room and has to be spent on a smaller pool, so real prices rise across the board. Work out how much money and how many spots your league removed before the auction starts and scale accordingly. And if your league uses different scoring rules than the three here, or starts positions we do not price, the shape of the board moves and this one will be a good guide rather than an exact answer.

Where to go next

The values under these prices are the same ones on the rankings board, recomputed for the same scoring, league size and quarterback rules, so the two pages can never disagree about who is better. To rehearse the room itself, the Mock Draft Trainer runs a snake draft against opponents that behave like real ones. To print something for a table with no laptop on it, the printable cheat sheet puts the same tiers on one page per position. And once the season starts, the Trade Analyzer uses these exact values to price a deal.