I’m a big NFL fan. I love getting together with friends on Sundays to cheer for the Bengals. Naturally, I love fantasy football.

The thing with fantasy football is that you really have to nerd out to be successful: You have to study your players, teams, injury reports, depth charts. Every week. For the entire 17-week season.

A few years back I came up with an NFL fantasy game that is exponentially less time consuming, and requires much less specific knowledge. Since the NFL is kicking off in T-minus two days, I thought I’d share how to do a Super Bowl Auction Draft!

The whole point of this game is to own the team that wins the Super Bowl. So instead of drafting individual players, you are drafting entire NFL teams! Because there are always a couple massive favorites (cough cough Patriots, cough), you can’t just take turns picking teams. Instead, it’s an auction draft… which is most fair and adds an interesting dynamic to the game.

Basic Rules

• 4 or 5 players, maximum
• Each player brings $50 to the table.
• $50 is the player’s budget and goes into the pot.
• Players take turns nominating a team.
• Each nomination requires an opening bid.
• Min bid increment of $0.25.
• Super bowl winner, runner up split the pot 80/20

That’s really it! The draft takes about 1 hour to complete, less if you don’t dilly dally.

Vegas Odds

In normal fantasy football, you look for “cheat sheets” that list players in order of how good they are expected to be. In this game the closest thing you’ll get to a cheat sheet are the Las Vegas gambling odds on each team to win the super bowl. From here, you have to manually decide how much you would spend on each team. But thats why this game is fun… you have to create your own custom system.

Favorites vs Value Buys

There are a handful of teams that are top tier each year. This year the favorite New England Patriots are around 7/2 to win it all, which is absolutely crazy. The other usual suspects are Packers, Seahawks, Falcons, Steelers, etc. They are basically the teams that everyone has extremely high hopes on, and wouldn’t surprise anyone if they brought home the Lombardi trophy.

Then there is everybody else. There are a lot of teams that are solid contenders, probably playoffs bound, but it’d be somewhat miraculous for them to win it all (AKA Bengals… WHODEY!). Will they win the Super Bowl? Almost certainly not. But, if you can buy several of these teams, who knows what will happen.

In our draft, an owner spent $44 on the Patriots, leaving him a measly $6 to buy other teams. He ended up with 3 teams total.

I went the other way. I bought 13 teams, and actually have 1 team in every single division. Sure there are some stinkers in there, but I think I bought them at a bargain. For example, I bought the Panthers for $2.

Divisions & Conferences

Each conference has 6 teams in the playoffs, 1 from each division plus 2 wildcards. Step 1 is to own some playoffs teams. One year I bought the entire AFC North so I’d be guaranteed at least one playoff team. It didn’t work out in the long run, but I was at least in the runnings in the post season.

The Super Bowl is always AFC vs NFC. If you own both teams in the Super Bowl, you win the entire pot! So it might be smart to have both AFC and NFC representation. Let’s say you spend your budget on the Packers and the Seahawks. Realize that only one of those teams can even make it to the Big Dance.

Have fun!