Fantasy football: Should you draft a TE early, middle, or late?

Fantasy football: Should you draft a TE early, middle, or late?

Tight ends are a tricky position for most fantasy football owners. Most years, there are only a few quality options at the position, making most team owners struggle to find a decent option every week. Tight ends are harder to stream than quarterbacks, as a good matchup doesn’t guarantee any more use for that guy on waivers who usually catches 3 passes for 30 yards. Most tight ends are touchdown reliant, making scoring hard to predict. This causes some leagues to switch to tight end-premium scoring, or to change the position into a WR/TE spot. I can’t speak for how well those ideas work, but I can explain the strategy behind drafting a tight end in regular leagues.

Just as I did in my article about when to draft a quarterback, I’m going to go over three strategies you can employ: the early round TE, the middle round TE, and the late round TE. Before we get into these strategies individually, it’s important to see how well recent ADP predicts tight success at the tight end position.

I compared the ADP of each of the top fifteen tight ends drafted in the past four years to their points per game output. This chart uses the ADP for PPR scoring, and players who didn’t play at least seven games were removed.

So it turns out that preseason tight end rankings are much more predictive than quarterbacks, whose trend line was rather flat.

Here’s some interesting info to take away from the data:

1. Rob Gronkowski was taken as the #1 TE in 3 of the 4 seasons used. His two bad years skew the early round data down.
2. Of the 23 TEs drafted in the round 5-8 range, 12 of them (52.2%) finished with < 10 PPG. 8 of them (34.8%) averaged < 9 PPG.
3. The three lowest scorers in the data (2019 O.J. Howard, 2019 Vance MacDonald, and 2017 Greg Olsen) were all drafted in between rounds 5 and 7. They also all scored 6.0 PPG.

Now that you’ve seen the recent trends, let’s get into the three strategies.