The Franchise League Football Auction Playbook: How to Secure Your Must-Have Targets While Balancing Elite Stars and Minimum-Salary Breakout Candidates
Image Credit: Jordon Kelly/Icon Sportswire. Pictured: Brock Bowers.

If you’re following along, you’ve read about the newest fantasy football platform for diehard fans like you, Franchise League Football. If not, find an introduction here. In FLF, we start with a seasoned roster of 14 players . . . and their contracts. Last week, I broke down the keep/drop decisions I needed to make prior to our preseason auction. Everyone in the league must keep between six and nine players . . . and their contracts, while leaving enough of the $100M salary cap to fill out the roster during that auction. That process, with commentary with my friend and cofounder of FLF, Dave Sukoff, is detailed here.

The FLF auction starts with the restricted free agent (RFA) round. All kept players with RFA contract status will come up for bids in alphabetical order. The commissioner set a bidding timer of 50 seconds for our auction, and we had eight RFAs to go through. As a reminder, college players who were drafted and kept become restricted free agents heading into their third NFL season. Any players picked up on waivers and kept also become RFAs.

Renee on the RFA portion of the auction: I bid on several RFAs, but not too aggressively, and not surprisingly, I failed to bring any of them home. There were some big bids early on from the franchises with money to blow. From a decision-making standpoint, there were clearly two trends. First, those who threw caution to the wind and went crazy to get players they liked. After all, this was their first real Franchise League Football action, and we’ve been waiting a long time to get here and get busy! I fall into the second camp, being more intentional with my spending and trying my hardest not to get carried too far away from my plan. The dopamine rush of your first real auction can lead to excessive risk-taking and potential regrets. Knowing who and what position I wanted heading in made for a long auction, but ultimately, I’m happy with the result.

I’m glad I bid on the RFAs, even though I didn’t win any of them, because it got me used to the bidding system in the new app. If you’re used to an escalating auction with time extensions, this is not that. You submit a blind bid within the allowed time and when the time runs out, the player goes to the highest bidder. In the RFA round, the previous manager gets an additional window of time (30-60 seconds, usually) to match the winning bid and retain the player (this did not apply to me). When we got to the free agent portion of the draft, I was ready to roll.

Renee’s Roster

  • $45 million available to spend on eight players
  • QB Bo Nix, $2M 2026
  • RB Christian McCaffrey, $19.6M 2027
  • RB Aaron Jones, $13.7M 2026
  • WR Amon-Ra St. Brown, $9.7 2026
  • WR Zay Flowers, $7.5M 2025
  • DST Denver Broncos, $2M 2026

If you remember, I kept the minimum six players from my starting roster. I needed a second QB, two TEs, and a kicker for sure. My plan was to spend big on Brock Bowers, the only elite TE not on a roster, and see what happened at WR and RB. I had my eye on kicker Jake Bates (Detroit), but that position was my lowest priority. My opponents generally came to the table with less money than I had, but there were two franchises with over $60M to spend.

Since Bowers was my must-have target for this league, I spent time understanding who else in my league needed a TE and had the money to spend. The highest-salaried TE was Trey McBride ($9.7M), which is fantastic for Dave Sukoff’s roster, but I knew Bowers would go for more. I calculated six teams with no TE or a backup (Kyle Pitts, Tucker Kraft), and all of them had money to spend ($23-77M).

Bowers was nominated early in the FA round, and I went big with a $14.7M bid, which I thought had a good chance due to how much salary was spent in the RFA round. It was a tense 50 seconds, but I did win him. Given his exceptional target share and volume, with an upgrade at QB, Bowers is a player I plan to keep for years to come.

A.J. Brown fell to me for what I felt was a bargain, $14.8M. Although I missed on Jalen Hurts earlier in the auction, I’m still all in on the Eagles offense. Brown is a solid week-in-week-out companion for St. Brown. No WR had a greater share of his team’s targets than Brown last year (35%).

I then entered a pretty slow part of the auction since there was a string of players nominated that I just wasn’t willing to build this franchise around. Eventually we got to a point where I knew I was in a financial position to win most players I wanted. Everyone has to save the minimum, $2M, to fill out their remaining roster slots and my opponents were all in that position or close to it. So I could win with a $2.1M or $3M bid. I was able to secure Bates, Dalton Kincaid, and rookie R.J. Harvey for the minimum.

Harvey was an interesting grab for me because I missed out on the higher-ranked rookie running backs, yet I liked his profile, and he correlates well with Nix and the Broncos D/ST. Although J.K. Dobbins is the likely starter for Denver, they’ve made room for more than one fantasy-relevant back in the past. At 5 feet 8 inches and 204 pounds with a 4.4s forty-yard dash, Harvey is in good company per the RotoViz Freak Score Calculator.   

Seeing him perform well in last weekend’s preseason victory over Arizona (three rushes for 18 yards and a touchdown) has me excited for a potentially big second half of the season.

There’s no denying that Kincaid has been a fantasy disappointment, and looking back I think there are two biases at play with my bidding here. Although, before I confess, I will say that I only paid $2.03M for him, and he is my backup to Bowers, so it’s in no way catastrophic. First, I’m based in Rochester, NY, which is very much part of Bills Mafia. My family are diehard Bills fans and we watch football together every Sunday. Having a rooting stake in your home team is just fun, even when it’s not optimal. Second, I drafted Kincaid as a rookie in the RotoViz Dynasty League (2.0), which is a Superflex, TE premium scoring league. After years of whiffing on RotoViz TE darlings like Irv Smith and Isaiah Likely, who’ve both languished on my bench for years (except for Likely in Weeks 2-4 last season — you might remember how that went for me), I fell for the Bills’ prospect. The twist is that, as the league’s No. 1 seed heading into the playoffs in the 2023 season, I needed to trade Kincaid for a starting QB. Since then, my regret has lessened, but I’m still haunted by what Kincaid should be able to do for the Bills and for one of my fantasy teams. The Bills are not exactly drowning in capable pass catchers, ya know? Of all the cognitive mistakes one can make, and there are many, my worst is playing the fantasy game according to what I think should happen rather than what is actually happening (Dalton Knox is still on the team, folks). Yes, that last sentence was written in the spirit of a reverse jinx.

The final aspect of this auction that surprised me was the way I backed into a Seattle stack. I wanted a backup QB, given our implementation of a novel injury-relief system that will allow a bench player’s second-half stats to count if our starter is ruled out of his game at/by the start of the third quarter. I nominated Sam Darnold, whom I would win for $2M if no one else bid. Darnold is probably no one’s idea of a building block, but he profiles as a solid backup QB for fantasy and offers some excitement on a new team. I paired him with Cooper Kupp and the rookie WR Tory Horton, who has been getting rave reviews at training camp this summer. The jury is very much still out on whether Darnold can have anything like his 2024 season in Minnesota, but as Kevin Szafraniec pointed out earlier this year, the addition of a deep threat like Horton could be the key to his success.

Ultimately, as with every drafter ever, I like where my starting roster is at. I’ve got a really nice balance of experience and youth, am well-distributed across teams with strong offensive potential, and was able to build a couple of positively correlated mini stacks with unique bye weeks. It’s really all one could ask for until reality turns our fantasy teams on their heads in less than three weeks.

Dave’s Roster

  • $16.1 million available to spend on eight players
  • QB Lamar Jackson $10.7M 2025
  • RB Saquon Barkley $28.6M 2026
  • RB Chuba Hubbard $7.5M 2026
  • WR Ja’Marr Chase $18.7M 2027
  • WR Rashee Rice $8.7M 2028
  • TE Trey McBride $9.7M 2026

I went into the auction already stacked. But that meant having essentially no money: $83.9M was tied up in contracts, leaving $16.1M for eight players. Every player I got would necessarily be close to the minimum. Barkley was a tough keeper decision at that price. In hindsight, though, it was correct. If I had gone into the auction with no RB1, I would have overbid to lock down one of the few elite RBs available.

Regardless of the scant cap space I had available, the key to my auction preparation is studying other rosters, available players, and projecting my own spending needs. There are 48 hours between the keeper deadline and the auction, which should be plenty. However, I like to roll up my sleeves much earlier. There is a lot to do, and FLF is a year-round sport. For this particular league, my studies focused on players projected to go for minimum salary and choosing among those I assumed would be available. If I knew I had more space, I’d take a similar approach — though I would expand my player universe. The adage “price, not player” is nowhere more apt than in FLF. Auction prep is about thinking through what you might be willing to pay for any given player, and planning for numerous permutations.

I knew going in I would be totally out of the RFA portion of the auction. I didn’t have enough cap space to outbid any of the base RFA salaries. Thus I had to count on others to take care of the key strategic priority of RFA: ensuring that franchises are forced to pay at least market value for players. As the keeper of an RFA, there is value in having that right of first refusal. Having picked up a free agent during the season on waivers, or carried a player from college through Year 3, it is only fair to have that value. But then it is incumbent on the rest of the league to reprice that contract. If anything, that the keeping franchise has this option to match should compel a higher bid than normal. Force the other franchise to spend more to keep a player that they are more than likely inclined to keep. For example, if Bijan Robinson were an RFA in your auction (which makes sense, because some franchise would have had him as their college player two years ago), then push all in for him. Not only is he a top-five player, but the other franchise has spent some time envisioning their lineup with him in it. Force them to spend big. The worst thing that could happen is they decide not to match, and you end up with Robinson for a somewhat elevated price.

For me, then, it was all about the available free agents. At QB, with Jackson on board, I was focused on backup QBs. This is a great example of the win-now versus the plan-for-the-future strategy. Jackson is in his last year of a Previously Extended Contract (PEP) — thus, with certainty, he will be a free agent next season. If I had Jackson beyond this year, QB2 might be a throwaway, and the focus would be on a solid, though minimum-salary, player (perhaps an Aaron Rodgers). With an eye toward the future, I would target a QB2 who could provide huge upside if he hits — I homed in on J.J. McCarthy (whom I did end up with on a minimum contract) — with the hopes that he is this year’s Nix. Kevin Szafraniec agrees, noting that Minnesota’s questionable defense is likely to force the Vikings’ offense to keep their feet on the gas pedal this season.

The RotoViz Screener puts McCarthy’s attributes in pretty good company.

RB was my chief concern heading into the auction, and those fears came to fruition. Barkley is top three at the position. But I don’t love Hubbard at RB2 — I simply felt it would be tougher to do better than $7.5M in the auction. My goal was to get three great upside backs. I default to RB over WR at flex, and as I construct a roster, I prefer to have five RBs to five WRs.

Renee: That might change as you adapt to half-PPR scoring!

RB scarcity tends to trickle down even to backups and prospects, and that’s how it played out in the auction. Trey Benson is my favorite backup — he has the trifecta of talent, an old player ahead of him, and a great situation if he moves into the starting slot. However, in order for him to be useful, there likely has to be an injury. I wanted Harvey, but simply did not have the money. I did like Bhayshul Tuten, and got him for the minimum. But he is really a prospect who I can’t expect to start any games for me. I have real RB depth issues — the price I paid for a top-heavy squad with no cap space.

I feel a bit better at WR. Chase is in his own tier at WR, and I’m a huge Rice fan. If I can weather his suspension, I will have the best WR tandem down the stretch. My goal was then to get players who can fill in as needed. At WR, I knew that would be easier than at RB. It was not how I planned it, but I ended up with both Emeka Egbuka and Jalen McMillan. Lots of upside with both, and together, they give me a chunk of one of the better passing attacks.

The Bucs ranked second in touchdowns per game (2.4, tied with Baltimore) and touchdown percentage (7.2%). As Chris Godwin and Mike Evans are good candidates to slow down and Baker Mayfield is hitting his prime, it was a perfect time to invest in the Tampa Bay youth. And while I would have preferred an upside RB, I love the potential of Matthew Golden in Green Bay. Leaving with two of the top-12 2025 rookies (per RotoViz rankings) for minimum salary definitely eases any worries about this roster.

As with QB, I prefer not to spend so much on a tight end. I have McBride as the top guy at the position. If it’s not McBride or Bowers, I don’t see a need to budget much more than the minimum at tight end. Even with injury replacement, I don’t like using a precious roster spot on a second tight end, as Renee did. If an RB or WR prospect hits, then that minimum salary is a massive value. If a tight end hits, there is much less value. I like the rookie tight ends this year and would have been happy to grab one had I not had McBride.

I went into the auction knowing how much of a fan Renee is of Bowers. Likewise, she knows how much I like Rice, but Rice was already locked down on my roster, and so that knowledge means nothing in the auction. I knew Renee was going to push all in on Bowers. She is also savvy enough to know that there is scarcity at the top, and even if she did not want to allocate that much to a tight end, she went into the auction with lots of money and little talent. I like her bid — definitely the right move. I like even more that it was predictable. In an auction where I have money, projecting where other franchises will allocate their resources is key. There are going to be a handful of the top-24 players available in any auction. I spend time doing scenario analysis on where other franchises are likely to bid, and that helps guide my own allocation and bid planning.

I grabbed a kicker (Cameron Dicker) and defense (Bills) for minimum salary toward the end of the auction. Dicker happened to be a top-three kicker for me. Defense I tend to stream anyway.

I don’t love my auction, but it was the best I could do with a pre-auction strategy that made the most sense given my roster. Barkley/Chase alone should get me close to the playoffs. Having the top QB and TE could push me over the edge. It’s how the minimum-priced prospects and backups do that will determine my ultimate success this season and beyond.

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Membership Required

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Have you ever played a certain wide receiver because of the quarterback your opponent was starting? Have you ever picked up a defense or tight end off waivers not because you need one, but because your opponent’s top option was on a bye week? Do you often fade players that are likely to be highly owned in DFS tournaments? If you in any way take…...

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