On Sunday July 12, in a suite at the Cosmopolitan, 12 of us got together for the Stopa Law Firm $10K auction. The prize is split between highest total points and whoever wins the playoff tournament.

The parameters are as follows: 1 QB, 2 RB, 3 WR, 2 TE, 1 FLEX, 1 QB-FLEX, 1 K, 1 D and six reserves, half-point PPR scoring. Here are the results:

My strategy was to buy 4-5 star players with most of my budget and fill in the rest with cheap, fungible players I'd be able to swap out as needed. I executed it pretty well with Eddie Lacy, Dez Bryant, Calvin Johnson, Matt Ryan and Cam Newton (top-10 QBs qualify as stars in what's essentially a two-QB league.)

The one error I made was paying $8 for Devonta Freeman midway through the auction as he would have been a $1-$2 player in the end game. For some reason, when Peter Schoenke brought him up at $7, I thought the bidding would keep going, even though that made no sense.

My rule in NFL auctions (and also in mixed league MLB ones) is to pay top dollar for the upper echelon guys and save the rest of your money to control the end game. It's those $5-$15 bids on middle-round players that kill you. (I probably shouldn't have paid $6 for Joique Bell, either. While the value was fine, it cost me a lot of flexibility in the end game, too.)

The other choice everyone had to make was either to buy the top few defenses and kickers or pass on them altogether, have a bigger bench and wait for training camp developments to unfold before deciding who to drop before Week 1. Because we auctioned so early, it was an easy call for me to have the bigger bench. Had this been late August, I might have tried to get the Bills defense or Adam Vinatieri.