We did the Mock Auction on Wednesday night. It’s always fun sitting down and competing for 3 hours against guys who know what they’re doing. And there’s a certain chess game to an auction, where you need to not only rank the players but decide what they’re worth.

It’s the first opportunity of the football season to figure out which players you’re high on. The guys you tend to end up with in an auction, those are the guys you’re higher on the 11 other guys you’re competing against. So there’s some measuring stick value.

It’s a 12-team league, and eight of the teams were in it last year. And a ninth guy, Lenny Pappano of Draft Sharks, has done it in the past but had another rep from his company sit in last year.

The seven other returning franchises (in addition to myself):
  David Dodds, Footballguys.com
  Scott Sachs, Perfect Season Fantasy Football
  Scott Pianowski, Yahoo!
  Alex Miglio, Pro Football Focus
  Sam Hendricks, Extra Point Press
  L’roy Anthony Hale, Fantasy First
  Paul Charchian, LeagueSafe.com

We were joined by three first-timers. (Not that they’ve never done auctions, but first time with this group, I believe). Tim Heaney of KFFL. Bryan Hough of FantasyTitan101.com. And Bruce Boase; Bruce qualified via the Fantasy Index Super League competition (that’s the one where you pick a fantasy lineup for all 17 weeks of the regular season). Boase had to beat out 400-500 other entries to win his spot at the table.

This is our 10th year doing this league, believe it or not. It’s my opinion that there’s a certain group-think that has occurred. It seems that people are maybe getting used to what others are willing to play and what others are trying to do. We all know, for example, that Dodds like to assemble a team with good depth. And that Sachs likes to pick up a pair of high-level quarterbacks.

I notice, looking at the past years, that the prices have trended downwards over the years. Especially the running backs. Either the owners are valuing those players differently, or maybe it’s a reflection of how the actual NFL game has changed. I tend to think the group as a whole has just gotten a little better at auctions as they’ve done more of them.

I won’t discuss this auction in detail. I’ll leave that for Andy in the magazine. But this particular installment was challenging in that everyone was cautiously appropriate in the early going. That makes it tough. Ideally in an auction, you’ve got a few guys burning through money, overpaying for $20 on guys. Then you come in later and cherry-pick a nice roster with a bunch of steals. Or you have the opposite – nobody is buying and you grab great deals early. But in this case, most of the players were going for 90-95 percent of their value in the early going, so you’re left wonder whether to jump in and settle for some good (but not great) deals, figuring the price on the remaining good players would increase in the later rounds. I found it to be challenging and difficult.

Ultimately, when I look at the prices over the 10-year history of the league, I see players going for less than before at quarterback and running back. Prices have been more consistent at wide receiver. And I’ll take a quick swing through the elite positions, looking at the top 2 players each at quarterback, running back and wide receiver.

The prices have dropped the most at running back. In the first five years of the auction a running back went for at least $60 every year. In three of those years, they went for $75 or more. Larry Johnson goes down in history as the highest paid player in Mock Auction history. Chris Liss of Rotowire bought him for $80 in 2006. Now bidding tends to die out around $50. Paul Charchian bought the No. 1 back this year, LeSean McCoy, for $51.

Here are the 2nd-highest paid running backs each year. Notice in the early years, the No. 2 back was blowing by the $65 mark. In three of the last four years, that same back for the first time hasn’t hit $50. Alex Miglio bought Adrian Peterson in this year’s auction, same as the 2013 version.

Prices have also dipped at quarterback. I was surprised to see Peyton Manning went for only $34. I thought he was “worth” $36. In seven of the previous nine auctions, the top quarterback went for more money. Manning went for $50 back in Year No. 1. That was the year he was coming off 49 touchdowns. Now that he’s coming off 55 TDs, he goes for only $34? I think I was the guy who bid $33. The winner on Manning, by the way, was one of the rookie owners – Bruce Boase (the reader who won the Fantasy Index Super League).

I see the same kind of deal with the No. 2 quarterbacks. Both Drew Brees (my purchase) and Aaron Rodgers (Scott Sachs) went for $26. In seven of the previous nine auctions, the second quarterback cost more. Both myself and Sachs, by the way, also bought a second top-10 quarterback. Sachs bought Andrew Luck for $18, while I purchased Nick Foles for $13. All of the quarterbacks, I thought, were underpriced in this auction. After Manning, the rest of the top 10 on my board all went for 52-80 percent of what I thought was their fair market value.

I see more consistency at wide receiver. (Very consistent, in fact, that the No. 1 wide receiver has been a Johnson five years in a row.) Fitzgerald has a $50 year. Andre Johnson went for $46 in 2010. Chad Johnson went for $32 back in 2007. Otherwise, they’ve been between $36 and $43 every year. Alex Miglio bought Megatron this year. He’s not afraid to spend. He got Peterson for $49, recall, so that’s $91 on two players. Last year, he also spent $91 on two players ($54 Peterson and $37 Rodgers).

And here are the other wide receivers – the 2nd-highest paid guys each year. Note on the 2005 figures, by the way, that we had a $100 cap that year, so I doubled those prices. A slight rise here. We had two players going for $36. Lenny Pappano went for Demaryius Thomas, and Paul Charchian bought Dez Bryant. In the past nine years, only two other No. 2 receivers have for more than $36.

One other note on these prices. We will play out this league, and it’s a no-moves league. That is, if you draft Josh Gordon and he ends up being suspended for the entire league, you’re stuck with him. If your kicker blows out his knee or whatever, you’re stuck with him. This kind of format essentially requires that each team at a minimum selects two of each player. It drives down the value of high-risk players like Gordon (who went for $3), and increases the value of durable, safe players who can be counted on for 16 games.

In order to minimize luck, every team plays every other team each week, using a best-ball score. (We use best-ball so that the results aren’t driven by who’s making the best trades, waiver claims and whatnot throughout the year). If you have the highest score in a week, you get 11 wins and no losses. If you outscore five teams, you go 6-5 for that week. Whoever has the most wins at the end of the season is the winner.

I won this league last year, which surprised me, because I didn’t think I had a great auction. Dennis Pitta ($9) and Michael Crabtree ($19) both got hurt before the season started, Vick Ballard ($17) went down after one game, Justin Blackmon ($6) played in only four games and Montee Ball ($26) didn’t pan out. But Andy Dalton and Antonio Brown exceeded expectations, no other teams hit it out of the park, and I as able to squeak it out. I don’t have the complete all-time numbers, but I’ve won it in three times and Dodds has won it twice. Nobody else has won more than once (but nobody has been in the league as many times as Dodds or myself).

The complete writeup of the Mock Auction will appear in the on-paper version of the magazine, coming out in early July.

—Ian Allan