528: Breakout Tight Ends

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Speaker 1: This is the Labor Podcast with your host JJ zacher Retha j J.

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Speaker 2: Zacher reson what's up everyone.

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Speaker 1: It's JJ Zacharyesen, the editor in chief at Fandel and at Number five dot com, in this episode five and twenty eight of the Late Round podcast. On many shows that are part of the FanDuel podcast network. Thanks for tuning in. I've talked about breakout running backs. I've talked about breakout wide receivers. To wrap up this little July series on breakout players today, I'm moving on to tight ends. Tight End is a little bit different than the other positions. You're only starting one of them on your fantasy roster, so few of them are getting drafted each year. With the running back and wide receiver studies, there were a lot of similarities in how to approach a topic of breakout players. With tight ends, it's a little bit different. And before getting too all the data on breakout tight ends baseball fans, just as a reminder, FANDEL is giving you the opportunity to get involved with daily fantasy baseball with the MLB Home Run Chat Challenge. Each day you can draft three players and you receive one point for every home run they hit score three points for a share of the two thousand dollars prize pool, and score six or more points and you'll want a share of the ten thousand dollars prize pool. All you have to do is head over to fandle today and drafter Sluggers. Eligibility restrictions apply. Head over to fandle dot com or download the fandle app for more details. So I think you'll get a better idea about this episode if you listen to the running back and wide receiver episodes that I've done over the last couple of weeks. If you miss those, hit pause right now and go back and listen to them. Really it's gonna help. But as I've done with the running back and wide receiver episodes, the way I'm finding breakout tight ends is by looking at which tight ends historically have exceeded expectation the most. I do that by plotting preseason expectation or average draft position by postseason result, or how many points of tight ends scored once the season is over. When doing that, a trend line gets created that shows us expectation. It shows us how many points we'd expect a player to score at a particular ADP now at running back and wide receiver. I looked at players who exceeded ADP expectation by one hundred and more points while being drafted after round five. That's what I've called breakout players with tight ends. If you use one hundred points as the baseline, your sample size is pretty small. So to find breakout tight ends and find the traits that they all share, we'll look at tight ends who exceeded expectation by seventy points. It's an arbitrary number, but it gives us a better sample to work off of.

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Speaker 2: Now.

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Speaker 1: I did a breakout tight end study last year, and the sample size of tight ends drafted after round five were opportunity cost is a lot lower, and of the players who also exceeded seventy or more points versus ADP, we had thirty five of them in total. So we had thirty five breakout tight ends from twenty eleven through twenty nineteen. Well, last season we added three more to the mix. Darren Waller was one of them who was being drafted a pick sixty five, so he qualifies. Jimmy Graham was another one who put up one of the weirdest tight end seasons that I can remember, and then the last one was Logan Thomas. Honestly, a lot of you guys just heard Jimmy Graham's name and you're probably a little bit confused.

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Speaker 2: But the dude was.

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Speaker 1: Picked at two hundred and fifty second overall last season, and he scored eight times on fifty receptions. He exceeded expectation by seventy one points. But regarding the thirty five in our sample before last year, the thirty five breakout tight ends, I found a handful of trends to help us spot some tight ends who could break out in subsequent seasons.

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Speaker 2: The first trend was.

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Speaker 1: That these tight ends usually don't come from nowhere, whether it's where they were drafted or the type of target share that they had the season. Before the breakout, we typically had some sort of idea who the breakout tight end was, and we've only had one tight end breakout who's been a rookie, so the same logic applies for that as well. Trend two was that the tight ends were usually second or thirty year players. That's pretty self explanatory. Trend three was that, unlike wide receivers, which you heard about last week, breakout tight ends seemed to come from teams with good quarterbacks, at least good quarterbacks by ADP. And then the final trend was that, unlike other positions, breakout tight ends have typically been athletic, at least as it relates to their speed scores entering the league. For the tight end breakouts last year, the athleticism thing did fit. I know Jimmy Graham runs like a dad now, but the study was based off of how these tight ends performed entering the league, since that's the athleticism metrics that we have. It's not like thirty year old tight ends are running forties. But the other trends really didn't work as well for the three tight ends last year. I don't think it means the trends are worthless and wrong. I think it just means that we may want to look at being more specific and refining them. So that's what I set to do. I wanted to see if there was something that I was missing, So over the last week or so, I've been studying the breakout tight end data to hopefully make this process smoother and better.

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Speaker 2: It wasn't just a.

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Speaker 1: Straight up reaction to what happened last year.

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Speaker 2: Don't get me wrong.

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Speaker 1: It's just that, in hindsight, I think some of the evidence that I thought was evidence really wasn't as strong as I initially thought. So let's make it stronger. And I mean, in fairness, the process did allow me to be on Logan Thomas pretty early last year, as you die hard listeners know, and I don't think anyone's beating themselves up about missing on Jimmy Graham, so I'm not mad about the results at all. But Logan Thomas was not a second or third year player. He kind of did come from nowhere, and he didn't have a good quarterback.

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Speaker 2: Attached to him.

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Speaker 1: It was really just the athleticism piece that got me on too him last summer. Regardless, let's take a deeper look into all of this criteria. Let's start with the first trend of these tight ends not coming from nowhere. I still think there's some validity to this if you look at our sample of thirty eight breakout tight ends, and I'm referencing thirty eight now because we have three more from last year to add in, but our sample had a median target shair of about fourteen percent this season before the breakout. That really is not insignificant. A fourteen percent target chair would have rung thirteenth at the position last year, so I wouldn't totally dismiss that general trend, even though it didn't apply to Logan Thomas and Jimmy Graham last year. I wouldn't put it on the top of my priority list from a criteria perspective, but it's something. We also didn't have a year two or year three breakout last season, But despite that, fourteen of the thirty eight breakout seasons have come from those players. That was a stronger percentage before last year. But those second and third year players make up the two largest subsets of any career years in our sample. We've had six second year tight end breakouts and eight thirty year breakouts. The only other years with at most three breakouts were year five and year ten. Now, the thing is that probably isn't that surprising given what I talked about with wide receivers last week. Fewer players are making it to year five, year six, year seven, more players will make it to year two. So like the coming from nowhere trend, I'm not sure this is the most important one to focus on. It's something to keep in mind, but I wouldn't prioritize it like I'd prioritize some of the things that I'm going to get into.

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Speaker 2: One of those.

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Speaker 1: Things is the good quarterback trend. Even though last year didn't help our numbers, the numbers are still pretty interesting. Like I said earlier, we have a smaller sample size of tight ends that we're working with compared to running back and wide receiver. According to my Fantasy League data that I'm working with, we've seen three hundred and twenty six tight ends drafted after round five. Since twenty eleven. That number has been seven hundred and sixty seven at wide receiver, and that makes sense. Fantasy teams need more wide receivers, and the majority of tight ends each year are being drafted after round five to begin with, So that three hundred and twenty six number makes up a large number of the tight ends being drafted in total, because we don't have a lot of top five round tight ends to begin with anyway, We've got three hundred and twenty six tight ends. Of those three hundred and twenty six, forty seven of them have been drafted during a season in which that tight ends quarterback had a top five quarterback EDP To put this another way, about fourteen percent of tight ends that have been drafted after picks sixties since twenty eleven had a quarterback who was being drafted as a top five quarterback in Fameantasy Football that same year. In other words, they had a good quarterback throwing them the ball. When looking at tight ends with quarterbacks who ranks six through ten, you've got fifty six of them. QB eleven through fifteen, there were fifty eight tight ends. QB sixteen through twenty there were fifty one, and QB twenty one, or worse, there were one hundred and fourteen.

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Speaker 2: So let's go back to what I just said.

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Speaker 1: Forty seven middle round and late round tight ends since twenty eleven have been drafted in the season in which their quarterback was a.

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Speaker 2: Top five quarterback by ADP.

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Speaker 1: So, for example, you could look at Patrick Mahomes as the QB one this year and then look at Travis Kelce. If Travis Kelsey was being drafted after round five, he would be part of this sample. But get this, of those forty seven middle and late round tight ends, ten of them ended up being breakouts. That's a hit rate of over twenty one percent. More than one in five tight ends with a top five quarterback have exceeded ADP expectation by seventy or more points over the last ten years. That hit rate then drops dramatically as you get to the other quarterback buckets. The QB six to QB ten bucket that has a tight end hit rate of eleven percent, QB eleven to fifteen has one of twelve percent, QB sixteen to twenty is eight percent, and QB twenty one or worse is also less than ten percent. Essentially, if a tight end has a stud quarterback by ADP, his odds of hitting look to be increased. Now, keep in mind this trend didn't exist for wide receivers. For wide receiver breakouts, the median ADP for their quarterback was about QB nineteen. For tight ends, that median ADP is QB thirteen. That's significantly higher. Now, my hypothesis is to why this is the case and why this exists is that good quarterbacks may utilize their tight ends differently because tight ends aren't always a quarterbacks first read. But good quarterbacks can progress through their reads faster, getting the ball to the tight end, thus generating more fantasy points.

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Speaker 2: For the position.

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Speaker 1: It makes sense in my head at least, But even if that's wrong, there does seem to be evidence that suggests that you want good quarterbacks for your tight ends. As the quarterback gets worse than ADP, the tight end hit rate shrinks, especially after that stud quarterback group. So we've now covered three of the trends from last year's study. I've noted that tight ends do seem to have somewhat of a decent target share of the year before their breakout, and they do tend to be year two or year three players. But I'd say those things are trumped by the quarterback thing, that good quarterbacks are generating more breakout tight ends in fantasy football. Let's retest the last piece of criteria, though, which is athleticism. The metric I used last year for tight end athleticism that seem most relevant is still most relevant is height adjusted speed score. It's basically just a heightened weight adjusted forty time measurement. For this, I grabbed all my data from my friends at playerprofiler dot com. Now, there are some duplicate breakout tight end seasons within our breakout sample. Delaney Walker, for example, appears more than once because he was a value for more than one season.

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Speaker 2: I don't want to double count hit speed.

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Speaker 1: Score, though, so know that with this calculation, I'm only using players who have data available, and I'm only counting their speed scores once. The average speed score among the sample was just a little over one hundred and ten. Now that number probably means nothing to you, but according to player Profiler, a speed score of one hundred and ten at the tight end position ranks in about the eighty eighth percentile. Seventy five percent of tight ends had a speed score of one hundred or more. That's a seventieth percentile score. These guys are very athletic players. You should be looking out for that when you're drafting, and you should be looking out for that arguably more than any of the other trends. This one's very obvious though, and it makes sense as to why it would be the case. The freakish tight ends are the ones who are doing more in the passing game. So those are the four trends from last year, revised a little bit. I've got a new one for you, though, and as usual, it has to do with ambiguous pass catching situations. You want tight ends to be part of ambiguous mass catcher groups and you want them to be the top player drafted from their team period.

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Speaker 2: Here's what the data says.

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Speaker 1: Over the last ten years, we've seen fifteen middle and late round tight ends get drafted as their team's top pass catcher by ADP. So what I mean by this is they were the first tight end or wide receiver to be drafted from their NFL team on average. So this year, think about TJ. Hawkins, center Mark andrews Now. It's a small sample of only fifteen players, but of those fifteen, five of them were hits. That's a massive thirty three percent hit rate. When looking at non top pass catchers, that hit rates cut down to under eleven percent. And even if you consider all the tight ends being drafted late as dart throw similar to what I talked about on the Wide Receiver show. Even if you think that's bringing the non top pass catcher number down, if you look at picks sixty one through pick one point eighty, which represents rounds five through fifteen, you're looking at a thirty three percent hit rate for those top pass catchers versus a fourteen percent one. It's still not close. And if you focus strictly on the middle rounds, it's still not close. The data actually suggests that middle round tight ends who have not been their team's first pass catcher drafted have typically not done very well in fantasy football. They have a hit rate of just five percent. So if there's a middle round tight end being drafted and he's not the first pass catcher being drafted from his actual NFL team, his rate of exceeding expectation by seventy or more points is only about five percent. For tightands who are the top pass catcher on their team by ADP, it's twenty five percent. Again, the samples are small here, and we don't really have obvious examples this season unless TJ. Hockinson and Mark Andrews end up fitting the ADP criteria of being drafted after round five.

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Speaker 2: But it does give us a good idea that TJ.

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Speaker 1: Hockinson and Mark Andrews are pretty good picks, especially Andrews because he's athletic and he has a top five quarterback by ADP. Hockinson doesn't have that quarterback. The interesting thing that I tested, too, is that this only really works when the tight end is the top pass catcher being drafted. From his team like the number one guy. I looked at tight ends who were either the number one or the number two pass catcher drafted from their team, and the hit rate converged and wasn't significantly different between being that top two pass catcher versus being the third. So it's really that you want the tight end to be the top pass catcher for his team by ADP. Otherwise you can basically ignore it. The in between doesn't seem to matter. Let's not take this a step further and look at it a little bit differently. Let's look at all tight ends drafted from round five through round fifteen again, so pick sixty one through one eighty, and let's look at if the tight end had a teammate being drafted in the top thirty six versus ones who didn't. So the first three rounds of drafts now as an example, one tight end who's being drafted after round five, who is a teammate being drafted in the top thirty six so the first three rounds is IRV Smith Justin Jefferson is a top three round pick. Meanwhile, a tight end who doesn't have it teammate being drafted in the first three rounds is Mike Gasicki. All of his relevant teammate wide receivers or middle round picks, the IRV Smith types. Among this group who've been drafted in the rounds five through fifteen, they've broken out at a twelve percent rate. The alternatives, so the guys who have middle round wide receivers with them, they break out in an eighteen percent rate, So Robert Tunyan or Gerald Everett. It's unfortunately not good news for those tight ends. It's not a death sentence. But again, this is all about probability, and this all makes sense when you look at the data a little bit differently. Among our tight end breakout sample, the average ADP for the top wide receiver on one of those tight ends teams was pick fifty nine. So again, the end of round five, thirty seven percent of our breakout tight ends had a wide receiver teammate drafted in the first three rounds. So the majority, albeit not a massive majority, but a majority of our breakout tight ends are coming from more ambiguous situations. So let's recap what this all freaking means. I'd say that you want your tight end to have some sort of target share the previous season, and that you ideally do want him to be on the younger side, but those two things aren't as important as raw athleticism and quarterback play. Athleticism and quarterback play seem to be more meaningful. And then all the while, it's not a bad idea to find a more ambiguous situation, especially if you can find a tight end who's being drafted as the first pass catcher from his team, even if he's not. Having a tight end with a teammate not drafted very high is better than having a tight end with a locked in stud on his team at wide receiver. One thing I want to add about the quarterback trend, I do think we may run into a situation pretty soon where the data isn't as clean as it is right now. With everything I've talked about throughout the off season, with mobile quarterbacks and the market finally being efficient and fantasy managers actually buying into the rushing component of fantasy football for quarterbacks, we may see things shift down a little bit. What I mean by this is mobile quarterbacks are now being elevated in fantasy football by ADP but it's not just because of their arms.

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Speaker 2: It's because of their legs too. So if we continue to.

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Speaker 1: See more pocket passers get drafted in that QB six to QB fifteen range, then we may see better numbers from tight ends associated with those quarterbacks. That's just something to keep in mind. The trend still holds true.

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Speaker 2: You want good quarterbacks for your tight end.

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Speaker 1: Now, as I mentioned in last week's mailback episode, you've got to take all of this information one at a time. If you can find a tight end that fits all the criteria, like yes, Mark Andrews basically fits all the criteria, although he's not always a pick after round five. But if you can find someone who fits all the criteria, that's perfect, that's who you should be targeting. Unfortunately, this stuff doesn't work so cleanly, and unfortunately some of this stuff is already baked into a tight end's ADP, with there being fewer tight ends to generally choose from. It's just another example as to why this study in applying this criteria is a little bit more difficult than running back and wide receiver, for example, the athleticism thing is a very real one. It's very true you absolutely want athletic tight ends. But if you go through a list of tight ends by ADP, it's kind of tough to find an unathletic tight end, but you can really use this criteria to cross off potential tight end targets. Like with the athleticism criteria, you can say no to Anthony Frickxer, and you can look at which tight ends have teammate pass catchers being drafted high and look and see if they have a good quarterback or not. For example, Cole Comet, he's got Alan Robinson being drafted in round three and his quarterback isn't in a favorable bucket ADP wise, add in the stuff that I talked about earlier this offseason about mobile quarterbacks and rookie quarterbacks, and Comet seems like a lower probability breakout this season.

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Speaker 2: I don't mind Cole Comet.

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Speaker 1: I actually drafted him in a startup this offseason, but I don't think this is his year. Go through that kind of exercise and you'll start to have a fade list for your draft, and that'll naturally increase your chances of hitting on your targets. Then, now, looking at everything that I talked about today, I'd say the players who seem to stand out the most would be Hawkinson and Andrews. But They're not necessarily middle round picks all the time, but I do think overall we can feel confident in them this year, despite middle round tight ends not always being good investments. Remember the bad investments for middle round tight ends are when they're not their team's first pass catcher. Mark Andrews and TJ. Hawkinson are. You can feel confident drafting those players. But outside of them, Noah Fan is kind of intriguing given his wide receiver teammates aren't being drafted high and he has a ton of athleticism, and Mike Kasiki honestly for similar reasons. And then there's Blake Jarwin. It does suck that Jarwin has teammates being selected so high, but he's got a decent enough athleticism profile and he's got a top five quarterback throwing him the ball. I'll throw this stat at you about Jarwin before I head out. Let you ponder who your favorite late round tight end might be this year. Since twenty eleven, we've had thirty six tight ends get drafted in the double digit rounds who had quarterbacks being selected as a top five quarterback and adp aka what's going on with Blake Jarwin right now? Of those thirty six, eight of them will breakout tight ends. That's a hit rate of twenty two percent, and that's one of the better hit rates that I could find while doing the ADP analysis. So it looks like I do like Blake Jarwin this season as a Late Round dart throw. That's going to do it for today's show, though. 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. You 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.