Waiver bids: how to price a FAAB bid from ADP movement and snap counts

The rules you are bidding under

Before pricing anything, know the auction. On Sleeper the default FAAB budget is $100 for the season, the default minimum bid is $0, and bids are blind: nobody sees your number until claims process. The highest bid on each player wins. When two teams bid the same amount, the tie goes to waiver priority, which rolls: win a claim and you drop to the end of the line. Unused budget does not roll over to next season.

Two things follow from that. A bid of $0 can win an uncontested player, so never spend money where nobody else will. And because a tie is decided by priority you do not control, a bid that matters should never be a round number your league mates will also land on.

Signal one: what the draft market just did

The first thing we read on a waiver candidate is not his box score. It is his draft price and how it moved. Consensus ADP is a live measure of what thousands of drafters will pay for a player this week, and when it moves sharply it is usually the fastest public reaction to news.

This week's example is the Packers backfield. The Packers placed Josh Jacobs on the commissioner exempt list on August 30. Between the two board days on file, Jacobs slid from an average pick of 32.0 to 55.8, later by 23.8 picks, and MarShawn Lloyd moved from 139.3 to 125.1, earlier by 14.2, from a 12th round price to an 11th. On the waiver wire page, built from real league add and drop events over the last seven days, Lloyd is the fourth most added player and carries a late round draft cost of 11.05.

That draft cost is the first number in the bid. A player the market now takes in round 11 is a player with real value in a league where he went undrafted. The three players above Lloyd on the most added list, Jacob Saylors, Malik Davis and Roschon Johnson, all show as undrafted, meaning the market has not priced them at all. An add spike on an unpriced player is a prompt to look, not a price.

Signal two: what he did on the field

The second signal does not exist yet this week and will exist for everyone by Monday, September 14: snap counts. Pro Football Reference publishes team by team snap counts for every regular season game, and FantasyPros runs a weekly report of offensive snap shares. Neither is a projection. They are a record of who the coaches put on the field.

What to read in them is share, not total. A back who played 60 percent of his team's offensive snaps in Week 1 has a role. A back who played 30 percent and scored twice has a highlight. The first is worth a bid; the second is worth a watch. For receivers, snap share tells you who is on the field on passing downs, which is a better predictor of targets than any single week's catches.

Snap counts also tell you whether an ADP move was right. If the market moved Lloyd up 14 picks and he then plays 65 percent of the Packers' snaps, the price was correct and the wire has a starter on it. If he plays 35 percent behind someone else, the price was early and the bid should be a rung lower.

The ladder

We price bids as a percentage of the original season budget, not of what you have left, so that a thin wallet is not punished twice. The rung is set by how much the add improves on the best free agent you could have at his position instead. That is the waiver replacement, and it is the right comparison. The player you drop only answers whether the claim improves your roster; it says nothing about what the add is worth.

Source: Parlae FAAB bid model.

Three modifiers move a bid inside its rung. Scarcity: fewer comparable free agents behind him pushes the bid up, to a ceiling of 1.3 times. Trend: an add count of 1,000 in a day adds 8 percent, 5,000 adds 15 percent. Season timing: a bid carries more of its base in September than in December, because the player has more weeks to pay it back.

One thing unlocks a bid above 60 percent, and only one: an injury or suspension that removed the starter ahead of the add on his own depth chart. That is the top of every FAAB doctrine, and it is the only case where 75 percent is on the table. And before any regular season snaps have been played, no bid exceeds 2.5 percent unless there is an opening like that, because a preseason price with no snaps behind it is a guess.

Autopilot applies one more brake: by default it will not spend more than 10 percent of your remaining FAAB on a single name unless you raise the cap.

A worked bid

Apply it to Lloyd in a $100 league, the week after the Jacobs news and before Week 1 snaps. There is an opening on his depth chart, so the preseason cap does not bind. His draft price moved into round 11, which on the board is a speculative rung player. The opening promotes the claim one rung, to emerging role. Base bid 14 percent. If he is the only Packers back on your wire and the trend count is over 1,000, the scarcity and trend modifiers take it to about 19, capped at the rung ceiling of 18. Bid $18, or $17 if you want to sit under the round number.

Then wait for Monday. If his Week 1 snap share comes in above 60 percent, he is a clear starter and worth 24 to 35 in leagues where he is still available. If it comes in under 40, he was a speculative add priced early, and 5 is enough.

What to do with this

1. Read the board movement page the morning after any big injury or roster news. A player moving more than ten picks earlier in a day is the market pricing a role before your league mates notice.
2. On Monday, pull snap shares from Pro Football Reference for every player you are considering and sort by share, not by points. Bid on roles.
3. Set the bid from the ladder in percent of your original budget, adjust one rung for an opening, and take one dollar off a round number so a tie does not send you to the back of the priority line.