2024 Fantasy Football FAAB Primer

Welcome to FAAB Whisperer — my weekly free agent bidding and waivers projection column. This will serve as a supplement to high-stakes crusher Nelson Sousa’s FAAB article. You’ll find both exclusively within the FTN High Stakes+ and NFL VIP packages. It will focus primarily on mid to high-stakes formats such as NFFC and FFPC.

This column will be published every Wednesday morning of the regular season. I’ll break down the top FAAB targets at each position (QB, WR, RB, TE, DST, TK) with a priority order/ranking and a bid amount range for each player.

We will reference a $1,000 FAAB budget as the opening season marker. Both NFFC and FFPC run FAAB twice per week. Both run their first FAAB of the week Wednesdays at 10 p.m. ET. NFFC runs their second one Saturday at 10 p.m. and FFPC Sunday mornings at 10 a.m. The second FAAB run on the weekends allows fantasy managers an opportunity to field full and healthy starting lineups where they may otherwise get hit with a player trending toward being inactive.

I’ll use the $350 NFFC Online Championship (aka, the OC) as the basis for our weekly data, specifically the %-Rostered of each player. The $350 mid-stakes contest is the perfect framework as they inspire an extra level of seriousness and accountability from entrants, thereby providing a more realistic grasp of the market and projected bid results. Using the OC also allows for a large enough sample to draw from as there will be over 400 leagues (5,000 teams) in this national contest.

With our first FAAB of the season less than a week away (Wednesday, Sept. 4, the night before the first games of the 2024 season), I wanted to set the table with some basic tenets, tips and useful strategies to help you stay ahead of the competition this season. Moreover, I have some intriguing data from the 2023 season to share with you. Hopefully, there are some tidbits within to help you be more astute and discerning with your bidding strategies in 2024.

The 5 Tenets of FAAB

Fight the Recency Bias Demon

The biggest flaw of fantasy football managers is overvaluing the short-term and future value of a player having a big game out of the blue the previous week. The examples of this are countless and can be identified en masse not only every season, but every week of every season.

Rookie wideout Michael Wilson scored 26.6 PPR FP (7-7-76-2) in Week 4, then commanded an average winning bid of over $300 (30%) across NFFC Primetime leagues, the high-stakes contest with a $1,750 entry fee. We spent an average of $60, $90 and $120 on Jalin Hyatt in three different weeks last season hoping to make Fetch happen. I don’t want to spoil the data extrapolation I’m sharing later, but let’s just say we wasted over 70% of our individual $1,000 budgets chasing scrubby third-string running backs hoping to hit the FAAB lottery. Granted, these leagues are competitive, fantasy managers are mostly aggressive, and the contests’ format of 10 bench players inspires (necessitates?) throwing large sums of FAAB dollars on the unknown. At best, we’re throwing money at players we project to be thrust into significant roles and volume, fueled mostly by significant injuries to incumbent skill players.

In this new world of uniformed social media hype on select players to be league-winners, market helium and overhype has taken on a life of its own. A fourth-string WR coming off his breakout game because two starting WRs didn’t play is the prime example of a helium player – one who is immediately overvalued. We the Market will overinflate his value and bid amount without much thought about that player’s long-term value. What happens when his two WRs return or they’re playing the shutdown Ravens defense the following week?

It’s almost like we should set personal protocols to keep ourselves in check to not spend more than $300 on a player unless it’s a no-brainer. Say it’s been five weeks, De’Von Achane and Raheem Mostert are crushing, and Jaylen Wright is hardly seeing the field. The guy in your league decides he won’t wait around for Wright, so he drops him in Week 4. But then Mostert is out for the year in Week 5 while Achane is nursing an ankle injury and Wright is projected for a heavy workload in the game and the Dolphins are huge favorites against porous run defenses the next two weeks. There we have an easy case for spending 40-60% of our budget. Even more so if your team is the one with Mostert or Achane.

A personalized set of rules for each potentially large FAAB spend should be created and utilized to make sure we’re allocating our funds optimally.

Focus on Ceiling/Upside

This tenet is specific to contests with large overall prize pools such as NFFC’s Primetime, OC and FFPC’s Main Event and FPros Championship (like the OC). The top prizes for the NFFC contests are $250,000 and FFPC is $1,000,000. Though winning our league should be our primarily goal, the ultimate dream is to make the fantasy playoffs and run hot to compete for the massive prizes. There are elements out of control such as luck and timing, but we must shoot for upside to put our teams in the best position to make a run. As you’ll see in the 2023 FAAB analysis soon, the swing-and-miss rate on the “next big thing” is quite high. We won’t be able to land the next big thing if we’re not taking swings, though. There are several factors to consider in identifying these upside difference-makers: path to playing time and meaningful opportunity, team context (depth charts, strength of offense, pace, schemes) and talent/pedigree. More direct paths to opportunities should be weighed higher, especially with players on better offenses.

Looking one week ahead to the first FAAB period, Jordan Mason will likely be a huge bidding target with Elijah Mitchell officially out for the season. Even moreso with the Kansas City Chiefs’ newest “McKinnon,” Samaje Perine, and possibly even rookie back Carson Steele, now that Deneric Prince has been cut. A long-term injury to Christian McCaffrey or Isiah Pacheco would pave the way for Mason or Steele to earn opportunities to actualize their fantasy ceilings and justification of the large sums of FAAB that may be spent on them. With Mitchell and Prince out of the way, the pathway is clearer, but earning those high price tags would still necessitate a confluence of events: injury to incumbents, confidence from coaches to be given the opportunity, rising to the occasion and of course, a bit of good fortune. Perine has standalone value as the likely pass-catching back in a usually explosive Chiefs’ offense who I believe is better than Clyde Edwards-Helaire.

Staying a Step Ahead of the Market

With more access to data, data models and breaking news updates, the average fantasy football player these days is more in tune with the free agent market and market expectations. It’s even more the case in the mid and high-stakes arena. Since NFFC and FFPC benches are 10-deep, we can optimize our rosters to be in the best position to maximize fantasy points each week and attempt to get ahead of the market for the following week. Why pay next week’s market price for the DST Stream of the Week if we have a roster spot to grab that DST in the second bid period of this week for pennies on the dollar? We don’t want to clog up roster spots in the draft with two DSTs since that 20^th-round pick can be used for an upside position player. But in that Saturday/Sunday second FAAB period we may already have clarity on who any easy roster drop is and could grab the best Week 2 DST for a buck or two instead of having to overspend and get into a bidding war for them in Week 2’s first FAAB. If we have clear drops, we should be making similar assumptions on skill position players one week ahead to avoid having to battle for them with league mates the following week. We do our best to avoid paying retail prices in real life, why not in FAAB?

There are 28 bid periods in the 14-week regular season, which comes out to $71 per week to spend our $1,000 budget ($7 per week for $100 budgets).

Most mid and high-stakes players are most aggressive with free agent bidding early in the season. The pre-Week 1 bidding period is especially crucial, especially in leagues where drafts took place in June, July and early August. You may even see some folks blowing most of their budgets on a single player. That would easily be the case with Mason if a worst-case scenario struck Christian McCaffrey before FAAB runs that first Wednesday night.

Here is the weekly FAAB spend from the 2023 NFFC Primetime. Week 2A (Wednesday) was the highest average spend ($91 per manager). If we pulled data from previous years, my assumption is we’d see a trend.

NFFC Primetime data table courtesy of Zack Waxman.

Drops & Conditional Bidding

This one is straightforward. If you have an obvious drop (someone is going on IR or is a low draft capital player who has no chance at earning offensive snaps), make sure you are setting enough conditional bids for that drop. Make it 10-plus bids under that drop if you must, so long as most of the later conditional bids are set to $1 and are in your preferred priority order. Bidding activity will be heavy all season, but especially early in the season when we all have a full plate of free agent dollars. Do not overreact to the Week 1 box scores if your players did not produce. Especially if it’s an early draft capital player (first 10-12 rounds). There will always be a plethora of wide receivers who appear to be worth going after, especially if they just had a productive game. Context is of the utmost importance here:

• Did the WR score most of his fantasy points on a big and/or fluky play?
• Were they in on 2-WR sets? What % of offensive snaps did they earn? Sustainable?
• Did a WR ahead of them on their team’s depth chart get hurt? For how long?
• Forgetting last weekend’s results, do you project this WR for more playing time and higher short and long-term value than the WR you are considering dropping?

There are plenty of other tips, which I’ll share as we move through the fantasy season. I’ll be sure to touch on “poker tells,” assessing leaguemates’ bidding trends and tendencies. And now, let’s wrap this up with my FAAB results analysis from the 2023 NFFC Primetime.

We Are All Bad at FAAB

It’s no secret, but we probably didn’t know just how bad it is:

We are collectively awful at free-agent bidding and waivers.

The highest-stakes fantasy managers in the world were wildly inefficient with spending their $1,000 FAAB budgets last season. I don’t want to make sweeping generalizations about the efficiency of casual fantasy managers, but it probably isn’t any better.

Identifying the best pickups week to week during the fantasy football season is usually a reactionary process doused in recency bias. Here are a few examples from the 2023 NFFC Primetime ($1,750 entry fee) national contest.

• Joshua Palmer, WR, Los Angeles Chargers ($494 average winning bid, Week 4)

Chargers receiver Mike Williams suffered a torn ACL in Week 3 and is declared out for the season. Palmer is scooped up in 24 Primetime leagues for a whopping $494 on average – the highest AWB in 2023 for a player added in at least 10 leagues. Palmer scored just 10.7 PPR points in Week 4, had a bye in Week 5, averaged 11.2 FP in Weeks 6-8, then missed seven of the final nine games with an injury.

• Emari Demercado, RB, Arizona Cardinals ($427, Week 6), ($249, Week 8)
• Keaontay Ingram, RB, Arizona Cardinals ($167, Week 6)

Cardinals starting running back James Conner injured his knee in Week 5 and undrafted free agent rookie Emari Demercado mopped up with 10-45-1 on the ground. Conner was placed on IR after the game. Primetime managers spend $427 on average for Demercado ahead of their Week 6 game against the Rams. Demercado earned just two carries and one reception (2.7 FP) in the game while fellow backs Keaontay Ingram, Damien Williams and QB Joshua Dobbs combined for 25 carries. Ingram accrued less than 10 total fantasy points over the next five weeks and never played another game for the Cardinals. In a cruel twist of fate, Demercado was again in high demand in Week 8. He drew the start, produced 20-78-0 (8.9 FP), suffered a toe injury, and was dropped on all teams before missing the next three games.

• Zach Evans, RB, Los Angeles Rams ($366, Week 7)

The Evans debacle was one for the FAAB history books. Kyren Williams was the overall RB2 through six weeks (behind Christian McCaffrey). In Week 6, what appeared to be a minor ankle injury suddenly turned into an IR stint. Evans, the presumed next-man-up, did not receive a single offensive snap in the Week 7 contest. He was dropped in most leagues almost immediately after, only receiving five total carries for the rest of the season.

Here are the 35 players acquired in a minimum of 10 NFFC Primetime leagues with an average winning bid of $100 or greater:

A special thanks to Zack Waxman (@ZackWaxx) for sharing his NFFC Primetime database.

As you may have noticed, the hit rate was minuscule – approximately 10-15% with C.J. Stroud, Trey McBride, Isaiah Likely as the only true hits. The spike week juice from Week 8 Joshua Palmer and Week 7 D’Onta Foreman were arguably worth the squeeze. Stroud was added for $57 (41 leagues) in Week 3 before going for $121 in the remaining 48 leagues the following week. The best free agent acquisition in the Primetime last season occurred in the first FAAB period before the season started. Twenty-six managers added Puka Nacua for an average winning bid of $38.

What’s particularly disturbing is the high rate of futility among the large-spend FAAB running backs who we presumed would make positive impacts on our starting rosters. This would be an entirely separate study, but my educated guess is that the level of run-bad among FAAB RBs was significantly lower than in recent seasons. We will absolutely swing and miss on numerous backup running backs this season, so what actionable steps can we take to be more efficient? There is much nuance here – it’s fantasy roster-dependent and major factors out of our control. The best first steps are to spend some time establishing some parameters and guidelines within your FAAB process. It shouldn’t be too rigid as there will always be exceptions. Establishing general guidelines will help instill some self-discipline and a more defined process so that we’re not firing extra budget dollars into the sun. Some examples:

• I’m not spending over $150 on third-string RBs who don’t have a path to PT without an injury.
• I’m not spending more than $5 on WRs after my third conditional bid.
• If I don’t have a locked in top-tier DST and have an easy drop, stream a DST on the weekend prior, for no more than $2.

Best of luck in the rest of your drafts and I’ll catch you Wednesday, Sept. 4 to help prepare us for the first big free agent bidding period.