Fantasy Golf Auction Draft

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1

Longtime lurker, first time poster.

TL;DR here is that my buddies and I have been building out a custom fantasy golf league over the past few years, we’re doing an Auction Draft for the first time this week, and I’m looking for some knowledgeable editors to review my work before draft time.

THE LONG VERSION…

Back in 2019, one of my friends put together a weekly fantasy golf pick’em league. It started out very basic – five of us each picked five golfers each week, and earned points based on where they finished the tournament.

The format has evolved significantly over the past few years – we tried the PGA Tour app’s fantasy golf feature for a year and hated it, so we went back to manual scoring. In 2020 we added two more guys, and in '21 we implemented a draft for the majors so we couldn’t have duplicate picks. Last year we expanded the draft for the whole year, added keepers, and tinkered with the scoring.

At its core, this fantasy golf thing has been a really cool way to stay in touch with a handful of friends, talk about golf, and have some light-hearted fun. One of the guys in the league works in collegiate athletics, so there’s no money on the line – we’re not trying to get him in trouble with the NCAA – but that hasn’t stopped me from taking it wayyyyyyy too seriously.

This year we’ve overhauled the scoring, scrapped the keepers, and introduced an auction-style draft. There are seven of us, we each get eight golfers on our team, and five active golfers each week.

I’m a teacher, and spent most of my Christmas break getting deep in the weeds on #data. I used a bunch of different criteria, read a bunch, listened to several pods, and created a composite ranking of 93 golfers. I tried to sort them into tiers and assigned dollar values (with a $100 “payroll”) for the draft, which is this Thursday.

Basically… I’m wondering if y’all can give me any feedback on my process. And also wondering, a little bit, whether I have a problem. I figured this was the place for all of that.

Here’s the link to my Google sheet:
Fantasy Golf Stuff

(Fully have no idea if posting links to spreadsheets is kosher around here or not, hope I don’t get flagged and promise that’s not a phishing scam!)

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Your process is good. Auction drafts can be super frustrating so I think tiers makes sense.

I run a league (we had 50 teams last year) and your data approach is what I usually do. I don’t typically win, but my wife or I end up in the money! About Top 20% pay out - I’ll be using your data as I work to put my team together this week.

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It should be so you can at least try and monetize all that work with no stakes on the line. Good luck in the auction!

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I love it - I’m in a different kind of league that’s for the majors only, but it definitely keeps the interest up over the course of the season.
My only comment would be that if you are going to compete every week, across the 40+ PGA events in a year, then a roster of 8 golfers may not be enough to have at least 5 in the field every week.

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Mike, this is an astute observation! We actually created the “Valero Rule” a few years ago, which allows a manager that has fewer than three active golfers in a given tournament temporarily add someone from the waiver wire.

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Or is that part of the strategy? We do a lineup of 12 - assemble your team based on points (Think DFS). Some weeks people have no one playing at all - was in a league with weekly payouts too so there was some thought put into that

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Makes sense - but as someone in San Antonio playing at the home of the Valero, also a little painful haha
In our grand slam pool you get 20 golfers, but once a guy is used, you can’t use him again

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