Fantasy Football Tight End Strategy
Tight Ends are always one of the hot topics of offseason discussion. Do the top guys give you a significant positional advantage? Are the mid-round guys always a bust? Can we stream the position? Who is the late-round guy who could be a league-winner? Or simply, how do I get enough points to just scrape by?
I myself had a mixed approach to Tight End in the 2020/2021 season with mixed results. In one league, I drafted Kelce early and in another I drafted Waller – I hated the look of my rosters in both and neither were significant contenders at playoff time. In leagues where I drafted late tight ends, I liked the look of my roster more but I hated trying to figure out who I could start at the position each week. The sweet spot was a league with Mark Andrews drafted in a value round, unfortunately he’s not going to be valued there moving forward.
So what do we do? To try and get the ball rolling on the offseason analysis, I looked at weekly top-12 and top-5 Tight End finishes to work out where they were drafted and try to answer one key question: Where should we be drafting Tight Ends?
Disclaimer: I’ve used PPR, non-Tight End Premium scoring.
Top-12
Lets start here. The table below shows the number of top-12 Tight End finishes in each week by the round that player was drafted (using Yahoo ADP from the end of August 2021).
For example in week 1, one Tight End drafted in Round one finished top-12, two top-12 Tight Ends were drafted in Round three and three top-12 Tight Ends were drafted in the late rounds or picked up off the Waiver wire (amongst a smattering of others).
There’s a clear first observation here. In any given week, there are more top-12 Tight Ends that were either drafted late or not drafted at all than were drafted in any other round. On average, there were five per week and the lowest in any given week was three.
So we just draft late then right? Right?! That’s fine as long as you can correctly predict which players they are going to be, and that’s not easy. This also doesn’t take in to account any point differential between the very top scorers and Tight End 12. Lets look at the same information but for top 5 finishes.
Top-5
The late/waiver wire Tight Ends still have the highest average but its marginal and the finishes are much more distributed. In all but two weeks, there was still a late/waiver wire guy finished top-5 so it’s do-able if you’ve got the right ones.
Perhaps a more appropriate takeaway is to look at the ‘middle’ rounds. We should firstly point out a couple of specifics.
- The high scoring in round five is Mark Andrews
- The high scoring in round ten is Rob Gronkowski
In other words, outside of these two very specific players the average of top-5 weeks from rounds three onwards is not good. You were significantly more likely to NOT get a top-5 finish if you drafted a Tight End in these rounds.
The Players
Lets look at the specific players, firstly for top-12 finishes.
And for top 5 finishes.
There’s a couple of different takeaways here for me. The first is that five players gave us a top-12 performance in 60-percent or more of their games played and nine players gave us top-12 in at least 50-percent of games. However when you look at top-5 performances, only two players hit the 50-percent mark (Mark Andrews and Travis Kelce).
Another thing that jumps out to me here is the likes of Dalton Schultz and Zach Ertz who mix it with the best of them when it comes to top-12 performances but drop right off when it comes to top-5 performances. Outside of Andrews and Kelce, 10 players returned 7 or more top-12 weeks: they were drafted anywhere between rounds three and not at all, with six (more than half) drafted in round 8 or later.
For top-5 finishes, we have six players (again excluding Andrews and Kelce) with 4 or 5 top-5 finishes: four of those (67-percent) were drafted in round 8 or later.
Conclusion
So what do we actually take away from all this?
- If you’re looking for a top-12 finish from your Tight End then don’t pass up mid-round value at another position to take one. You’re just as well hanging on to find the cheaper guys in good situations
- Similarly, getting carried away with the next mid-round breakout Tight End who is “bound to hit this year because his situation is just so good” probably isn’t going to bring you much better success than waiting a few more rounds
- You can still get a top-5 edge with the big guns. This year it was Kelce and Andrews with Andrews being a value. However, buyer beware! Darren Waller and George Kittle were in that zone in 2020 drafts and it didn’t pay off due to one reason or another
My one biggest takeaway is not to reach for Tight Ends. Sure, there are some top level guys that can give you the edge but even the best ones are only giving you a week-winning performance half the time. And outside of those players, the hit rate in the middle rounds is no better than the later rounds despite how enamoured we get with a player’s opportunity.
When it comes to 2021 drafts, remember this and play the value game. But I suppose we do have Kyle Pitts going in to year two…
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