Why Our FAAB Bids Look Low: What 2025 Guillotine Leagues Show
By Patrick · Survive The Chop ·
Our FAAB bids are often well below what it takes to win a player. That's on purpose. In 2025 guillotine leagues, teams that kept most of their FAAB through the first few weeks won their league more often than teams that spent it fast.
The number we show is what a player is worth to your team, not what it will take to win him. Here's the 2025 data behind that, and when to spend more.
The gap between our bids and what wins
The gap is real. Early in the season, elite players usually cost far more than our number. In Week 4 this season, we suggested 12–15% of your starting budget for Jonathan Taylor. He sold for a median of 58%.
You can see both numbers in FAAB Insights. Each player shows our bid and an Est. market price, which is what similar players tend to sell for in leagues like yours. Our weekly FAAB price report shows what winners actually paid in the latest waiver run.
What happened to teams that spent early
We looked at 458 completed guillotine leagues from 2025. For each team, we compared how it spent its FAAB with whether it won the league.
| What the team did | How often it won the league |
|---|---|
| Spent 40% or more of its budget in one of the first 3 waiver runs | About a third less often than other teams |
| Had spent less than 20% of its budget through Week 5 | About 2 to 3 times as often as teams that had spent 80% or more |
These results show what happened, not exactly why.
What we do know is that early prices don't last. As the league's FAAB drains, prices fall toward our numbers.
Prices fall toward our numbers
Early prices are the highest of the year. In 2025, top-6 running backs sold for about half of a starting FAAB budget in each of the first 6 weeks. By Week 11 they sold for about 10%.
Our bids come down too, because they're a share of the FAAB you have left. For a top-5 running back or receiver, our bid starts at about a fifth of your remaining FAAB. Prices fall faster than that.
In 2025, a top-5 running back or receiver sold for a median of about half of the league's average remaining FAAB in Weeks 1 to 4. In Weeks 12 to 14 it was 17%. By then, a bid of a fifth of the league's average FAAB would have won about 4 in 9 of those auctions.
So you'll lose most early auctions for elite players, and you'll start winning more of them as the season goes on.
You'll lose some bids
With our numbers, you'll lose a lot of auctions in the first few weeks. That's expected.
Bid our number anyway. Waiver bids are blind, and not every league has a big spender. If it lands, you got a starter at a good price. If it doesn't, your FAAB plan can show you cheaper players who fill the same spot.
You don't need to win every auction to build the best team.
When to spend more
Our bids aren't a ceiling. These are the times to spend more:
You're close to the chopping block. A starter now can keep you alive. In FAAB Insights, the Aggressive setting raises our bids by about 30%.
The season is winding down. By Week 12, the FAAB a team had left no longer helped predict the champion. Prices are lower by then too, so our bids win more often.
See your chance to win
We built a new view to show where all of this leaves your team. Chance to win is the first thing you see in League Overview. It shows each team's chance to win your league, based on 3 things: roster strength for the rest of the season, points so far and its share of the league's remaining FAAB.
We tested it on 352 guillotine leagues from 2025. The team we gave the best chance won about twice as often as a team picked at random.
Building it showed the same pattern as the spending results. Early in the season, a team's share of the FAAB left in its league helped predict the champion almost as well as roster strength did.
The chances are not bidding advice. Spending FAAB can lower your chance on that page, because it counts FAAB left. That doesn't make a good buy a mistake.
Get bids for your team
Connect your Sleeper league for bids based on your roster, available players and remaining FAAB, plus each team's chance to win. The article is free; the paid app brings the advice to your team.
Already connected? Review my FAAB plan.
About this data
The spending results use 458 completed 2025 Sleeper guillotine leagues with 8 to 20 teams, a FAAB budget and a recorded champion. Spending comes from each league's winning waiver bids on Sleeper. For each waiver run, we compared teams that were still alive that week. To account for league size, we measured each group against an even chance, which is 1 divided by the number of teams left.
Each result has a range we're 90% confident in. Teams that spent 40% or more in one of the first 3 runs won 0.55 to 0.80 times as often as other teams. Teams that had spent under 20% through Week 5 won 1.9 to 3.2 times as often as teams that had spent 80% or more. These are observational results, not proof that a bidding strategy caused a championship.
Running back prices are the median winning bid, as a share of the starting budget, for running backs ranked in the top 6 at the position, across 2025 guillotine leagues. The prices against the league's average remaining FAAB come from contested 2025 claims on running backs and receivers ranked in the top 5 at their position when the claim was made, in 199 leagues with 14 or more teams. Our bid for those players starts at about a fifth of your remaining FAAB and changes with your roster and league.
The Chance to win test used 352 leagues that we didn't use to set the chances. Across Weeks 1 to 12, the team we gave the best chance won its league 22.7% of the time, against 11.0% for a team picked at random.
2025 was the first season of Sleeper's guillotine leagues, so all of this comes from one season. We'll check it again against 2026 results.