ITFFL FAAB: How This League Bids, in 548 Claims

ITFFL FAAB waivers run on Tuesdays, the budget is $1,000 a season, and the minimum bid is a dollar. Everybody in this league knows the feeling that goes with that: you type a number into a box on Monday night, go to sleep, and on Tuesday morning find out whether you were the decisive one or the person who paid $340 for a handcuff who will be inactive by Thanksgiving.

Six seasons of that ritual now sit in one file: 2,527 transactions from 2020 through 2025, of which 548 are completed winning waiver claims worth $43,555. That is finally enough to stop guessing about how this league bids and start describing it.

The short version: ITFFL does not bid like one league. It bids like two leagues wearing the same jersey, and which one you face depends entirely on what week it is.

What ITFFL FAAB bidding actually looks like

Here is every season of completed claims, with the numbers that matter.

• 2020: 87 claims, $0 to $756, median $26, mean $73.80, 19 at $100+, $6,419 spent.
• 2021: 86 claims, $0 to $901, median $20, mean $91.70, 28 at $100+, $7,890 spent.
• 2022: 86 claims, $1 to $623, median $37, mean $76.00, 19 at $100+, $6,532 spent.
• 2023: 83 claims, $1 to $666, median $25, mean $77.30, 18 at $100+, $6,417 spent.
• 2024: 103 claims, $1 to $900, median $40, mean $84.80, 25 at $100+, $8,739 spent.
• 2025: 103 claims, $1 to $1,000, median $33, mean $73.40, 25 at $100+, $7,558 spent.

Look at the gap between median and mean. In every single season the mean is two to three times the median, which is the fingerprint of a distribution with a long tail bolted onto it. The typical winning bid in ITFFL is small, and the typical week still contains somebody detonating a quarter of their budget.

Across all six seasons, 134 of the 548 winning claims went for $100 or more. That is roughly one in four. At the other end, 67 claims were won for a dollar or nothing. So a quarter of this league's waiver activity is expensive, an eighth of it is free, and the part in between is the part nobody brags about.

The median ITFFL bid is $20 to $40. The mean is $73 to $92. Nobody actually bids the mean. The mean is just what happens when eleven people bid $25 and one person bids $600.

Five managers own every one of the twelve biggest bids

This is the leaderboard nobody asked for and everybody is going to scroll straight to.

• $1,000 — 2025, aal3, week 4
• $901 — 2021, aal3, week 2
• $900 — 2024, purplepigs, week 13
• $777 — 2021, Athletic Supporters, week 1
• $756 — 2020, End Of Story, week 1
• $720 — 2020, Hollywood Home Team, week 7
• $685 — 2021, End Of Story, week 5
• $666 — 2023, Athletic Supporters, week 2
• $655 — 2023, Hollywood Home Team, week 1
• $629 — 2023, aal3, week 3
• $623 — 2022, End Of Story, week 1
• $601 — 2022, aal3, week 13

Twelve bids. Five managers. That is the whole list, and it has been the same cast of characters for six years. aal3 has four of the twelve, including the only bid in league history that emptied an entire account: the full $1,000 in week 4 of 2025, which by definition left nothing for the following ten weeks. End Of Story has three, all of them in the first five weeks of a season. Athletic Supporters and Hollywood Home Team have two apiece.

Thirteen managers have played at least two seasons here. The other eight have never won a claim anywhere near this level, not once in six years. Whatever you thought the league-wide culture was around enormous FAAB swings, it is not league-wide. It is five people.

The money goes out early, on the least information

Pool every completed claim by week across all six seasons and the shape is unmissable. Weeks 1 through 4 account for $20,301 of the $43,555 ever spent. That is 47 percent of the money on 32 percent of the claims. Week 1 alone averages $142.40 per winning claim. Week 2 averages $121.10.

Seven of the twelve biggest bids in league history landed in weeks 1, 2 or 3. Ten of the twelve landed by week 7. In four of the six seasons, the single largest bid of the entire year was placed in the first two weeks.

So the league's most expensive decisions are consistently made when it has the least information. A week 1 waiver bid is placed on one game of evidence, which is roughly the amount of evidence you had in August when you decided not to draft the guy. A week 9 bid is placed on eight games. The average week 1 claim costs $142.40 and the average week 9 claim costs $38.70, so this league pays nearly four times more per player for the version it knows nothing about.

Does FAAB spending actually win anything here?

This is the part that will start the group chat. Average FAAB spend per season by manager, alongside their average regular-season finish and their title count.

• The Sixth Dimension — $998 a season, 2 seasons, 6.50 average regular-season finish, 0 titles
• Athletic Supporters — $970, 4 seasons, 5.50, 0 titles
• aal3 — $918, 5 seasons, 7.00, 1 title
• Hollywood Home Team — $900, 6 seasons, 6.50, 0 titles
• End Of Story — $745, 6 seasons, 4.50, 0 titles
• ITFFLGOAT — $637, 6 seasons, 5.33, 0 titles
• Brancho Country — $622, 2 seasons, 9.50, 0 titles
• Fighting Armadillos — $602, 6 seasons, 5.00, 1 title
• DVO92A6 — $586, 5 seasons, 7.20, 1 title
• Football Enthusiasts — $574, 6 seasons, 7.67, 1 title
• Any Given Sontag — $429, 6 seasons, 6.00, 2 titles
• purplepigs — $418, 6 seasons, 7.00, 0 titles
• Howell's Pals — $77, 3 seasons, 7.00, 0 titles

Read the top and the bottom of that list together. The two heaviest spenders in league history, The Sixth Dimension and Athletic Supporters, average essentially the whole budget every year and have zero championships between them. Any Given Sontag averages $429, ranks 11th of 13 in spending, and has two of the six titles ever awarded.

Five of the six championships in league history belong to managers sitting 8th, 9th, 10th or 11th on that spending list. The one exception is aal3 in 2024. Meanwhile End Of Story has the best average regular-season finish of anyone who has played all six years, 4.50, spends a healthy $745 a season, and has never held the trophy.

And then there is Howell's Pals, who has averaged $77 a season across three seasons and won the 2024 regular season outright at 10-4. Seventy-seven dollars, in a league where somebody once spent a thousand.

Six titles, five different champions, and the two managers who spend like the budget is a countdown timer have none of them. That is not proof that frugality wins. It is proof that the story we tell ourselves about aggressive waiver management has never once been checked against the ledger.

Be careful with all of this, because it deserves care. Thirteen managers, six seasons, season counts ranging from two to six. A title is one bracket run in a format where eight of twelve teams make the playoffs and the best regular-season team usually does not win. This is correlation across a small sample and it does not establish that spending less causes winning. What it does establish is that in this league, spending more has not been enough on its own.

The $0 bid era, and what the $1 minimum changed

An artifact worth preserving: 2020 had 17 winning claims at $0 and 2021 had 12 more. From 2022 onward there are none, because the $1 minimum came in. The $1 bid took over instead, appearing 7 times in 2022, 10 in 2023, 7 in 2024 and 5 in 2025.

The rule change did almost nothing to behavior, and that is the interesting part. The bottom of the market did not get more expensive, it just got renamed. Roughly one claim in thirteen since 2022 has still been won for a single dollar by somebody who noticed a backup running back on Monday night and typed a one into the box while everybody else argued about whether to bid $250.

The pick'em angle: bidding is a pricing problem, not a scouting one

FAAB and a weekly pick'em pool are the same game with different clothes on. In both, the player everyone likes is not the value, because everyone likes him and the price already says so. The edge lives in knowing what the room will do before the room does it.

You already know things about this room that no national FAAB article can tell you. Five specific people are capable of a $600 bid and eight are not. The biggest bids come in the first three weeks. One claim in four goes for $100 or more. That is a price list for eleven opponents, and it beats any breakout prediction.

Same discipline applies to picks. Pull your own history on the statistics page and find out where you are actually good rather than where you feel good, then check the leaderboard to see who has been quietly outperforming their reputation. It is rarely the loudest manager in the chat, and almost never the biggest spender.

The barbell has one more chapter, and it belongs to the back half of the season. Once the panic money is gone the wire goes very cheap for a stretch, then very expensive again right before the bracket. That is The ITFFL FAAB Endgame: What a Dollar Buys in Week 12 Coming Soon, where leftover budget either becomes a roster or becomes nothing. The draft-night version of the same argument lives in the six-year draft breakdown.

Waivers process Tuesday. Bid accordingly, and check what the last six Tuesdays of league history cost before you do.