385: Finding Breakout Tight Ends

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Speaker 1: This is the Lady Podcast with your host JJ zacher Retha j J zacher reefon What's up everyone. It's JJ Zachares and the editor in chief at FanDuel and at number five dot com. And this is episode three hundred and eighty five of the Late Round podcast with many shows that are part of the FanDuel podcast network. Thanks for tuning in. If you've been listening to the show the last couple of weeks and you've heard me talk about how to spot breakout running backs and wide receivers. Those studies were actually done before. A couple of years ago. I went through a similar process and spotting breakout wide receivers and running backs. I just wanted to refresh the study to be more detailed and to get a better process. I stopped there though, I didn't analyze the tight end position. But today that's what I'm gonna do. I'll talk through what a breakout tight end even is. I'll talk about the things that breakout tight ends have in common, and then I'll give some of my favorite breakout tight end picks for this twenty twenty season based on that criteria. Before getting into that, though, I wanted to send another reminder about fandels Football Multiverse. Each week fandl's YouTube page broadcast two simulated Madden games. Each game includes a what if type scenario like this week, for instance, one of the games is the Steelers and the Browns, where the what if scenario is what if the Browns had drafted Lamar Jackson instead of Baker Mayfield. So Jackson is the quarterback for Cleveland. But you can watch the game on Wednesday at eight pm Eastern where my colleague jim Sonnis and I do commentary for the game, and you can build a fantasy lineup based on the outcome of that simulation for free by going to fandel dot com Slash Multiverse. There's a DFS tournament with three thousand dollars in prizes based on those simulations. So make a lineup for free, check out the fandal YouTube page and have a little fun while sports are on hold. Okay, So, like the other shows on spotting breakout players, the question we have to first solve is what even is a breakout player? How do we define what a breakout tight end is. Once we do that, we can get a sample of tight ends and see what those breakout players had in common. If you've listened to the show the last couple of weeks, then you generally understand this process. I looked at all tight end seasons since twenty eleven, and I charted a tight end's average draft position versus how many points that tight end scored in that season. So the X axis is the overall ADP for a player, the Y axis is how many points that player ended up scoring in PPR leagues. That gives us a trend line, and that trend line tells us what we'd expect from a tight end at a certain draft slot. So, just as an example, a tight end drafted around pick one hundred would be expected to score roughly one hundred and twenty five PPR points this season. One selected at pick one hundred and fifty, he's closer to one hundred expected points. Now, using that information, we can find tight ends who outperformed ADP expectation at the highest rate. But since we're dealing with breakout players, we don't really need to look at what's happening with early round tight ends. Not a lot of early round tight ends far exceeded expectation anyway, But since opportunity cost shrinks, a good bit after round five. That's where we'll look for our breakout tight end sample. For purposes of this study. To get a large enough sample size, I looked at all tight ends drafted after round five or pick sixty. Overall that outperformed ADP expectation by seventy or more points, and that since the twenty eleven season. That gave me thirty five individual tight end seasons and thirty individual tight ends. Who made up those seasons and those breakout tight ends shared some things in common, so let's dig into those things. The first trend that I found within this group is that breakout tight ends tend to not come from nowhere. We saw this with wide receivers too. A large number of these tight ends had a decent target share the year prior to breaking out. Twenty three of the thirty five tight end seasons in our sample, or about sixty six percent of them, they had a target shair that was at least ten percent during the season prior to their breakout. That's not a low number, even if it seems low. On average. Over the last nine years, there have been about twenty five tight ends per season who hit that mark. Last year we had twenty eight, so it's not the easiest benchmark in the world to hit. And another thing about the coming out of nowhere trend is that of our sample of thirty five tight ends, only one of them was a rookie. It was Evan Ingram, So they're not coming from nowhere from that standpoint either. The majority of the tight end seasons were actually early round day one or day two picks as well, a very nice sixty nine percent of them were. And when you look at the thirty individual tight ends in that sample and not the tight end season sample, that number is still sixty seven percent. So they saw volume in previous seasons, they were not rookies, and they're generally day one or day two picks. That tells us that they're not completely coming from nowhere now. Trend two is that these guys are usually year two or year three players. In the breakout wide receiver study, young wide receivers broke out at a more intense rate, but twenty three percent of the breakout wide receivers were from year two or year three. It's good to target young players, but more so from the perspective that their rate of breaking out is more significant. Those younger wide receivers were exceeding expectation by a whole lot now with tight ends. Though, it's not so much that year two or year three tight ends were scoring significantly more points versus expectation than other players in the breakout subset. It's that they made up a large large portion of the breakout group. Forty percent of the tight end seasons in our sample were from year two or year three. I thought that was pretty insane. Now. Trend three is that breakout tight ends usually play with good quarterbacks. I mentioned in the wide receiver episode last week, the quarterbacks didn't seem to matter that much. The average ADP for the quarterbacks who were throwing the ball to our breakout wide receiver group was QB nineteen for tight ends, though it's QB thirteen. And when a tight end really out perform formed his ADP, the tight ends who outperformed expectation by one hundred and more points, their quarterbacks had an average cost of QB ten. Tight ends who exceeded expectation by seventy to ninety nine points, they had a quarterback with an ADP of QB sixteen. It seems like quarterback play matters a little bit more for the tight end position than it did at wide receiver, at least when you're looking for a breakout. And then the final thing for tight ends, which was not found with running backs and wide receivers, is that breakout tight ends are usually athletic. Hayden Winks from roto World put an article together about a year ago that showed how different measurements correlated to tight end success in fantasy football, and one of the measurements that correlated best to tight end points per game was speed score, which is height adjusted forty time. So, as I mentioned before, we have thirty five tight end seasons in our sample and thirty overall tight ends. Using playerprofiler dot com, I got the speed scores for twenty eight of those tight ends. Two of them weren't available. Of those twenty eight individual tight ends, the average speed score was one hundred and eight. That's an eighty sixth percentile speed score at the position, and only twenty one percent of the tight ends had a below average speed score. So to recap the four trends, the first is that these players aren't coming from nowhere. The second is that they're often year two or year three guys. The third is that they play with good quarterbacks, and the fourth is that they're athletic. Those are the things to keep in mind when trying to spot a breakout tight end. Now, like other shows, I want to give you guys some picks for the twenty twenty season. I want you guys to come to your own conclusions, of course, because having a process is important. That's what this is all about. But this is where process led me. The first guy is Hayden Hurst, who I've been talking about a lot in the show over the last couple of months. You have the quarterback, you have decent athleticism, and that he had an eighty first percentile speed score. He's a third year guy, and he's actually not coming from nowhere. Not only was he a first round pick, but he had almost a ten percent target share last year. That's kind of surprising, but again that's the target share that we typically see in the previous year for breakout tight ends. Given the offense that he's in, I love Hurst to exceed expectation this year. Now, another tight end to target could be Mike Gasicki. He fits the criteria really well aside from the quarterback point, but he's super athletic. He's a thirty year player, and he saw plenty of volume last year. The stars are aligning. Kasiki makes a lot of sense in the late rounds, which is not a take that I've shied away from this offseason either. Now. I really wish that TJ. Hockinson was fully healthy, because like the other guys that I just talked about, he also fits these trends really well. The problem is that the Lions offensive coordinator Darryl Bevill said that Hockinson may not be one hundred percent yet, but even in limited time last year, Hockinson still cleared the ten percent target chair mark as a rookie. He's got the quarterback, he's got the athleticism. He just needs to be healthy and he should be able to pay off his ADP. If he is healthy, he could be this year's Mark andrews Now. I think those three tight ends, Hrs, Kasiki and Hockinson, they're fairly obvious. But one lower tiered player who you can get really really cheap right now is IRV Smith. I do like some other tight ends in the tier above Smith, like Noah Fant maybe John hus Smith, but I wanted to provide a cheaper example, and I think IRV Smith is that example. I feel like no one's talking about the fact that IRV Smith also cleared the ten percent target share mark as a rookie. He ended up with thirty six catches in over three hundred yards last year as a first year player, and it's not like that happens all the time at tight end. We've averaged about two of those seasons from a rookie tight end per year over the last two decades. Smith won't be coming from nowhere if he does breakout, and he's pretty athletic. He's at least got a speed score that's well above average, and he's a second year guy. He's a year two player, and his quarterback situation isn't terrible. It's not as high as what we've typically seen in terms of quarterback ADP, but Cousins isn't a bad option to be throwing your tight end the rock. Irv's kind of interesting too, from the standpoint that the Vikings lost Stefan Diggs and they have question marks elsewhere in the offense. Given that he's basically free right now, I'm into him. I'm also into trading for him in Dynasty, where I need some tight end help. Now. Like I said, there's likely going to be some players that didn't talk about who you might like. I just wanted to explain the process and where the process led me. Maybe you like Dallas Goddard. I can't hate that. I like Dallas Goddard too. Maybe you like the two guys that I mentioned in Noah Fan or John hus Smith. If I'm being honest, I think this year a lot of Later Round tight ends really fit the mold pretty well. Hurst and is Sicki are my go tos, but we're already seeing their ADPs rise a little bit. We may have to dig deeper. But fortunately there are a good number of guys who have a chance to break out this year. Like I've been saying, though, guys, this is all about probability. I'm just trying to provide a process to help you put together sustainable strategy year over year, and I hope these Finding Breakout Players episodes have been helpful in doing that. It's a short show, but that's gonna do it for today's show. Thanks to all of you for listening. If you've got subscribe to the Late Round podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found, and don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks everyone, I'll talk to you later in the week with the Mailbag episode.