NRL SuperCoach: How to set-up an Auction League

Auction drafts and leagues are not for the faint of heart; and do require a bigger level of commitment from your group, so understand your personnel before taking the plunge. 

Before we get to settings and rules etc let's just set expectations and discuss some quick points:

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• First, the obvious part of auction drafting for NRL SC is that no platform offers this ability as standard. You need to handle it "offline" and then put the time in to allocating the players into the teams afterward. This can be done in many ways - but fundamentally it requires time. Luckily - at the bottom of this article I provide you with a template to use.

• You can either use a spreadsheet to track team lists and prices - or do it manually on a whiteboard if you're all together on draft day. Any approach will be labour intensive for someone on draft day - note this. It will also take an effort from the commissioner to run a snake draft as commissioner and allocate the right players to the right teams after draft day and before round 1. 

• Similarly, auction drafts themselves take time as the nomination and bidding process can vary in length, but over a full draft for a full league this adds up. Expect your draft to take beyond 2-3 hours easily - unless you're strict on nomination speed or your rosters are really small. Don't get me wrong; it'll be the most fun and engaging 3+ hours of your year, but it is a commitment so your league needs to be committed.

• It should be mentioned that Auction drafting requires skill and knowledge. If you have a league that has a few really new NRL SC players and some veterans, the veterans can easily dominate if the new players don't prepare accordingly. Factor this in to your planning and commissioning. Maybe provide some preparatory material to your new players to assist in balancing it out (such as a list of NRL players in order of highest averages the year prior. Just an idea if you're trying to warm some fringe operators in to playing an auction draft - soften the blow a bit).

• Auction drafting also requires a bit of strategy and smarts in the heat of battle, for example in relation to managing your budget and roster accordingly - again - one of the best parts; but also an area of risk for newcomers. Therefore, when deciding which modality, you're going to leverage to facilitate your draft, consider having the budgets and costs tracked in a spreadsheet - for example - to help newcomers manage their roster accordingly. The template I provide does this. 

• In the same vein; you could balance the risks by going off of a set nomination list (I don't advise this particularly) or at least by showing a nomination list in some order for people to base their nominations off. This lowers the risk of savvy players exploiting newbies by leaving high quality players unnominated until later in the draft and scoring huge bargains as a result of the lack of knowledge or info of newcomers. It's not a must, it's just the things you need to consider when approaching a new auction draft. 

• Public media is focused on snake drafts - it can make it hard to convey this to Auction values - but that's where I step in and try to deliver a platform for that discussion.

• Lastly in this area of considerations, if you're playing for a good whack of money or what not - then just set the auction up appropriately (we'll get to that!) and let it run - if a fair whack of cheddar is on the line then people need to commit to preparing and planning themselves - that's adulthood and that's good competitive integrity. The above is more about just making sure everyone gets a fair go if you're relatively new. 

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Moving on to some of the positives if you need to convince your league of why you should auction draft:

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• It's the absolute pinnacle of preparation, strategy and fantasy/sport knowledge.

• There is no "number one pick" for someone to ride into the finals. If you want the best player - in your opinion - you need to pay the market price. If your evaluation of a players value is different to the consensus of your group, then you could easily score bargains if you're willing to take on the risk of that evaluation - and therefore be rewarded in ways a snake draft simply can't provide.

  • Let me provide a working example. Let's say it's 2022 - Nicho Hynes is starting his career at the Sharks in the 7 jersey. He's had a blistering finish to 2021 at Fullback for the Storm. Can he deliver as the main man at the Sharks? You think he can. The auction draft is humming along. Someone nominates Nicho Hynes after 30 mins. You still have your full $200 budget but no players on your roster as a result. Nathan Cleary just went for $70. Tommy Turbo went for $90. You and a mate get the bidding on Nicho up to $55, he won't get any higher on an unproven player. You're happy with $56 for Nicho Hynes. He ends up having the best supercoach season of any player; and you got him for $14 less than Nathan Cleary - which you can use to spend on the rest of your roster. You win the league because of this gamble! How good!​

• There is nothing more all-consuming and engaging than an auction draft. The adrenaline and fun is unmatched. You're in a room with your mates trying to understand how much to pay for Junior Paulo - and when that Parra fan pays $50 for him you all piss yourselves laughing at the overpay. Now his budget is cooked and he's miserable - so you nominate Gutho next time round just to put him under pressure to spend the rest of his money too early. The fluidity of the expected "market price" for players is dynamic and absolutely thrilling. Someone could spend $50 for Luke Keary and 2 hours later Dylan Brown goes for $22 because everyone forgot to nominate him and some savvy player sat patiently waiting for everyone's budgets to diminish to bring the sting out of the bidding war. Nomination order is a huge part of the strategy - and is just as important as budget and roster management. 

• The absolute best part of auction drafting is that, within reason, you can get (most) of your favourite guys. Your hard work of planning and watching NRL can finally pay off in an auction draft as you can get who you believe in, at the cost you're willing to pay. You don't just miss out on Scott Drinkwater because you got the 9th pick anymore. You can get him if you want him. That's the best way to play fantasy. You get to enjoy your favourite players and ideally win with them. 

• There are many more reasons why Auction is best - but you wouldn't be on this website if you weren't already halfway to implementing this.  

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Moving on to settings and rulesets (insofar as we can map that out here):

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• Any league size is feasible; but 10 or 12 team leagues are best - similar to snake drafts. 

• Roster construction can be standard; but my personal current (2023) preference is to drop a CTW away and even a 2RF away and make thosebench spots. With injuries/origin/byes and HIA's I believe bench spots create a more fair environment to reward good drafters. So I think that's like 11 starters and 6 bench. (17 total roster). Until the supercoach team implement a better way to deal with HIAs in draft in the actual application we need to facilitate for the current origin/HIA/injury/bye periods with bench use. 

  • There is an argument that deeper bench play places too much weight on the draft outcome. I understand this view, but in the same vein; having deeper benches means you can stash more FA/Waiver talent in the early weeks (if you don't draft too well); in which you can claw back some depth and use that as trade material later. It's really just: be attentive and prepared for the draft = success; or be attentive and prepared during the season = success. ​

• Captains league make auctions more fun. Pay big for superstars and see how you manage the rest of your roster! OR - go for a hugely deep and balanced roster - can you live without a superstar?

  • Similar to above sub-point, I'm currently of the view that Captains can help balance the issues with HIA early game departures a little bit. Sure it can go the other way too; but in an auction you can pay for the ability/risk to facilitate by spending 3/4 of your budget on 3 elite superstars who can be captains. At least in an auction this avenue is available to you! The power is in your hands; what strategy do you want to follow?​

• Waivers should be last pick to bottom obviously. 

• $200 starting budget for all. 

• Nomination order literally doesn't matter but you can have fun with it - it's actually part of strategy so going off a list is not recommended. Late draft it can be ok to have the auctioneer suggest names if you're scraping the bottom of the barrel and need to help people out. 

• Nomination time; give people 5-10 sec to nominate early doors, then 10-20 sec to nominate late in the draft. Early doors it's easy but at the $1 player picks it gets rough trying to remember who to nominate and there's important strategy at this juncture in the draft so more time is needed and is required.

• Bidding Time; the hardest auction rule to monitor/manage on the day (and why bringing in an external AUCTIONEER can be highly valuable) is the bidding countdown time. How I manage this is basically by committee and common sense; and so far after 4 years we haven't had an issue believe it or not. As the $$ figure for the player reaches the ceiling; the auctioneer essentially restates the players name; the current price and bidder and starts a countdown of 5-0 allowing for a final review of all parties. At 0 the player is sold to the highest bidder or someone can step in prior and increase the price if desired. This is a bit of a nuanced area and requires review and agreement by the league. Again, bringing in an external auctioneer could solve this as their sole job is to manage the price and the timeclock. 

• Another rule, to be cognisant of is that teams need to fill their roster. The template I provide facilitates this calculation, so people know how much money they have to fill their roster with. In theory someone could spend all of their money, less the roster spots at $1. $1 is the minimum required nomination amount. 

  • So if you 17 roster spots, you could theoretically spend $184 on your first player, which would leave you with $16 for the remaining 16 roster spots. Just know that you cannot bid again on any of your following players if you were to do this. This exercise helps illustrate the idea behind $ and roster positions.​

• Leaving space here for anything I forget in this first pass:

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How to facilitate a Live Auction Draft?

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• I'm going to provide an excel template for you to re-use for your league! How brilliant. I haven't seen this offered in community at all to-date. 

• What we do is display this spreadsheet on a large TV in front of the group and use it to track rosters and remaining budgets etc.

• YOU WILL need to jump in there and learn how the sheet works.

  • You type a players name and the sheet automatically reads the database for the players team and position - then you type the cost in which updates the budget and remaining max bid price. This ensures people don't spend money THEY DON'T HAVE. You NEED to fill your rosters for a fair draft. ​

  • You WILL need to update the player database for 2024. I will update the template prior to 2024 draft season if you're willing to wait or check back in. 

• Again, someone needs to be an auctioneer and someone (maybe the same person if they're not drafting their own team) needs to spend time updating the sheet. It can be intensive over a few hours - look after this person if they're also drafting - take regular breaks and give them a moment to review their own team and draftboard at intervals.

• I've left some players and prices in there just to help you learn/indicate how it all works. Reach out if you get stuck. Credit to my league mate Joey for the template construction.