Renee Miller shares some of the most important strategic lessons she has learned from participating in multiple Franchise League Football auctions and how they influence her approach to the upcoming season.
Have you heard about the newest format for fantasy football yet? It’s Franchise League Football (FLF), and you can check out my introduction to the game, how to navigate keep/drop decisions, and what a real league’s auction reveals in the RotoViz Dynasty tab. I think of it like a hybrid between hardcore dynasty and DFS. You start with a fully seasoned roster of just 14 players, make your cuts to keep between six and nine players, then round out your roster in a blind-bid auction while staying under the $100M salary cap. Oh, and every player comes with a contract salary and duration. Some can be extended — for a price — and some become restricted free agents, which allows the market to set their salary.
I’m the CEO of Franchise League Sports, so it’ll be no surprise that I’m in four five of these intense, addicting leagues for our inaugural season. After guiding the development of the app and trying it out in countless tests with my team at Scope Labs, Inc., I moved all of my “home” leagues over to FLF. I’ve finished three of the five auctions, the final stage before game day play begins Thursday. Here are some of my strategic takeaways for this game.
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5 Strategic Takeaways from Multiple Auctions
- If you’re used to drafting a ton of best balls, you might think a short timer is ideal. Timers of 20-30 seconds are great when you’re doing 20 rounds of a snake draft. But in bidding on RFAs and FAs in the FLF auction, I learned that 60-75 seconds is much preferred. These decisions will affect your franchise for at least the next three years, so you don’t want to feel rushed.
- Do your research! The app gives you 48 hours between roster cutdown and the auction start. I’m a pen and paper person, so I went franchise by franchise, noting their available salary, positional strengths and needs, and whether they would be likely to match salaries for any RFAs they kept. Players like Jahmyr Gibbs and Bijan Robinson were kept at their rookie salary of $6M, but ultimately would cost between $20-30M. My boyfriend made a spreadsheet for our family league, but it’s the same concept. You need to predict what others will do in order to devise your own strategy for filling out your roster.
- The trickiest part of the preseason auction for me was balancing future dominance with win-now potential. “Boring” veterans like Calvin Ridley, D.J. Moore, Davante Adams, and Josh Jacobs are probably more startable early in the 2025 season than exciting rookies like Bhayshul Tuten, Ollie Gordon, Tory Horton, or Dont’e Thornton. While it’s great to load up on young talent for the minimum salary ($2M or close to it), you can’t neglect to field a viable team in Week 1.
- Your salary cap is $100M. At some point in the auction, you’ll see that a couple of managers have saved enough to bid well more than others. In other words, they can get whomever they want, while I might have exactly $6M to fill my three remaining spots. It might be tempting to show off and throw out $8-10M bids just because you can, but you’ll be carrying those salaries into the next offseason. Don’t pay a dollar more than you must to secure your guys.
- Be patient and don’t put yourself in that $6M-for-three-players position I referenced above. Save at least a few hundred thousand so you can always outbid the people who didn’t think that far ahead. Late in the auction, most people are going to be nominating guys they want and hoping to win them for the minimum (all they can afford). I was in a draft that was at this point, and someone nominated Travis Hunter, a player I had on my wish list. With a $2.01M bid, I got him. The app shows you your max bid at every nomination; I’ve learned never to place it but to save a couple of decimal places for the endgame.
Preparing for Week 1
Let’s talk about setting that first week’s lineup. Some of you are thinking, “Is there an easier task in fantasy football than setting Week 1’s lineup?” Maybe, maybe not. With nine starters (including K and D/ST, which I’ll ignore because you’re starting the one you have) and five bench spots, you might be pressed into some tough decisions, especially if you went in for a lot of young, unproven rookie players. Because we will have injury replacement (not for Week 1, but very soon), most franchises are carrying two QBs and even two TEs.
We also have a preseason waiver wire processing Thursday morning at 4:00 am EDT, so you can tinker even more before the final decision(s) must be made. For the league I’ve written about before, I don’t really have any tough decisions this week. Bo Nix vs. Sam Darnold is definitely Nix. I have Christian McCaffrey, Aaron Jones, and RJ Harvey at RB; even the matchups are awesome for the veterans. At WR, I did stack some Seahawks, but the two Browns — A.J. Brown and Amon-Ra St. Brown — are definite starters. My TE is Brock Bowers. So it comes down to Zay Flowers or Cooper Kupp in the flex.
On paper, they had very similar 2024s, with Kupp, of course, missing several games due to injury and now running alongside Jaxon Smith-Njigba in Seattle. Three factors push me to start Flowers in my flex spot, despite his overall poor showing against the Bills last season. First is the matchup. The Bills are more fantasy-friendly than the 49ers, allowing about 30 more passing yards and 0.1 more touchdowns per game than San Francisco. Second is age. I’m admittedly ageist, OK? Third is QB rapport. It’s not a stat, but Lamar Jackson and Flowers have been together for two full seasons while Kupp and Darnold’s connection is new. I have a fourth, not that it’s strictly necessary, but the point total on the Bills-Ravens game is seven points higher than Seahawks-49ers. More points in real life usually means more fantasy points.
What If Your Decisions Aren’t So Clear?
In another league, I do have some challenges. My WR room is very young outside of CeeDee Lamb: Matthew Golden, Dont’e Thornton, Travis Hunter, and Quentin Johnson. My RBs — Ashton Jeanty, TreVeyon Henderson, Chuba Hubbard, and Tank Bigsby — are going to have to pick up some Week 1 slack. Despite Jacksonville getting the literal league-best RB matchup, Bigsby is probably the odd man out of this group this week, with everyone projecting Travis Etienne as the starter. I might have to make the unusual (for me) move to use an RB in my flex. Alternatively, I’m considering dropping Johnston for someone like Stefon Diggs, who is available on the waiver wire. Other tempting options would be Darnell Mooney or Marvin Mims — both late-round best ball favorites of mine this summer.
The mindset shift from building a winning franchise through trades, keep/drop decisions, and the auction to winning Week 1 comes at you fast. It’s going to be fun to see how this inaugural season plays out. I have no doubt that there is much for me to learn, but I learn best by doing. Thanks for being along for the ride as we navigate this new fantasy format, the first to really change the way fantasy football is played since the advent of DFS 15 years ago. Stay tuned during the regular season as we have some exciting updates planned!
