751: Investing in Rookie Tight Ends

00:00:02
Speaker 1: This is the Late Podcast with with your host JJ zacheras J Shake Zacher reefon what's up everyone, It's JJ Zacharyesen in this episode seven hundred and fifty one of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by FanDuel.

00:00:20
Speaker 2: Thanks for tuning in.

00:00:22
Speaker 1: A question that's been popping up since the launch of the Late Round Prospect Guide surrounds how I value tight ends? If I have models at running back and wide receiver and those models help me, what do I do with the tight end position? Well, to be fair, I do have a tight end model that I've been working on over the last few weeks. Things finally clicked and I've been moving forward with one. For anyone who's subscribed to the Late Round Fantasy Football newsletter, you got a couple of emails your inbox just last week about that model. But honestly, I don't put as much thought into that position as they do the other two positions.

00:00:54
Speaker 2: And there are some obvious reasons for that.

00:00:57
Speaker 1: Tight Ends are valued differently in fantasy football can to running backs and wide receivers, and it's because the position doesn't matter as much in fantasy you're only starting one of them. The demand is lower. Each twelve team league is only starting twelve tight ends when you're starting way more than twelve running backs and way more than twelve wide receivers. That leads to fewer tight ends, giving you a significant edge in fantasy. Imagine a world where your twelve team league was starting thirty tight ends in a given week instead of twelve. Those lower tiered tight ends would barely be scoring any Fantasy points. A lot of them would be giving you zeros every week. In that scenario, the standard middle of the road tight end one they're giving you a better edge because the baseline has shifted. Worst tight ends are being started, giving the higher end tight ends more of that edge. But we know that scenario isn't common. I mean, some things don't even have a tight end spot at all. That naturally makes fewer and fewer tight ends relevant in fantasy. And with fewer and fewer tight ends being relevant, our approach to the position is to truly just chase gold. Getting a bronze or a silver level tight end, that's fine, but we want Travis Kelcey or Mark Andrews or George Kittle, and clearly those tight ends aren't popping up very frequently. This makes the process for evaluating tight ends more difficult because you're chasing this ceiling that doesn't come very often. It comes more often at running back and wide receiver because our range for a ceiling is just wider. They're more usable because we're starting more of them. There's an easier chance for those players to really make a difference versus the rest of their position. But at tight end, we're not getting difference makers all the time or every single year. We really only have a handful of true difference making tight ends every decade. But there's this other component to tight end evaluation that I want to focus on today. Not only is the position just hard to nail down because only a select fuel will become truly elite, but based on dynasty market dynamics, investing in the position during your rookie drafts probably isn't a good idea either. Let's start by looking at general rookie draft data. I analyzed my Fantasy League dot Com rookie draft average draft position data since twenty eleven in an attempt to see how well we do it essentially ranking tight ends quite simply, I looked at the correlation between average draft position versus the player's best season in points per game across his first three years in the league. And I did this at running back and wide receiver, two of the three positions. Tight end had the weakest correlation, but it really wasn't by much. All three positions were actually pretty close. It wasn't significant enough for me to say, hey, we're really bad at ranking tight ends compared to how we rank other positions post draft and entering the NFL. So that's good for tight ends even though we're technically worse of projecting how well they do. The problem with investing in them during your rookie draft is deeper than that.

00:03:54
Speaker 2: Though we may be.

00:03:56
Speaker 1: Okay at finding which tight ends to pick compared to other positions, but what actually happens in the market after these players start playing in the NFL or after you make a selection and draft a tight end during your rookie draft. Now, I've done studies on how rookies appreciate and value in the past, and while doing those studies, I've talked about how your dynasty roster can sort of be looked at in two ways. The first way is straight up production or how many Fantasy points that roster is going to score in a redraft league, that's all we care about. We just want as many fantasy points as possible, and we don't care what players help us do that. It's not that straightforward in dynasty because there's this second component, which is value. The value of a team is more about the future. It's about the pieces in place. It's no different in the NFL either. There are teams who may be productive, who may have a shot to win it all this season, but.

00:04:52
Speaker 2: Are they valuable?

00:04:54
Speaker 1: Do they have pieces on their roster that'll be there for years to come. You can't underestimate the value piece because that's what helps create a winnable roster year in and year out. You of course need to make sure that your team is eventually productive, but having value on your team can lead to a ton of that production. Now, given what I'm looking at today, I want to discuss the value component of dynasty roster building. The question I'm asking is, if I draft a tight end during a rookie draft, am I gaining value with that player more so than players that I draft at running back or wide receiver. And to help answer that question, I look at Dynasty League Football's startup ADP which dates back to twenty fourteen, so we've got eight years of startup data that also includes next season data. And that next season data is important because we needed to help judge whether or not a player actually increase in value from one year to the next. We don't want to draft players who in year one were at X and then year two they were at X minus y in terms of startup ADP. We want these players to be at X plus Y. We want them to improve. Let's start by just looking at every single player who's included in this data set, so every single player who's been taken in a startup draft since twenty fourteen. And since we're looking to see if rookie tight ends are worth the investment, let's just focus on rookies. In this sample, we have one hundred and eighty two rookie wide receivers, one hundred and fifty rookie running backs, and fifty eight rookie tight ends. Of those wide receivers, a little over thirty six percent of them saw their value increase year over year, meaning their average draft position in startups increased after their rookie season and into the second year of their career. That number was almost thirty nine percent at running back, So running backs appreciated in value better than wide receivers did across the entirety of the sample. At tight end, that was under thirty five percent. So when looking across this massive sample, tight ends increase their market value worst. That's when looking at this in a binary way. But I don't think it's really fair to stop there. The reason these numbers are so low is because there are a whole lot of players getting rafted at like pick two hundred and a startup draft, and those guys have almost no chance of becoming anything in fantasy football. They basically become undrafted the next year. What we really should be focused on are the higher end picks, or at least the players who have a decent shot at becoming fantasy relevant.

00:07:16
Speaker 2: So instead of looking at the whole.

00:07:18
Speaker 1: Sample here, let's look at startup adp of players drafted in the top one fifty. When we do that, we find that fifty four percent of rookie wide receivers saw their ADPs improve from year one to year two. That number was a little over fifty one percent at running back, And those numbers match what I've talked about before on the show rookies generally improve their ADP from one year to the next, which makes plenty of sense because they're young and older players then get knocked down except a tight end. That is, when looking at rookie tight ends who were drafted in the top one fifty of startups since twenty fourteen, there have only been fifteen of them, so roughly two are entering that range every single year, and of those players, forty six point seven percent of them saw their ADP improved year over year. So again, wide receiver in this top one fifty range, they improve their ADP from year one to year two at a fifty four percent rate. Running back was at fifty one to fifty two percent, tight end forty six to forty seven percent. So if you have a rookie tight end who's got a startup ADP in the top one fifty, he has better odds to see his ADP decrease year over year than increase. Now, if we shift to the top one hundred in startup ADP, our sample of tight ends obviously is not very big. There haven't been many rookie tight ends with a top one hundred startup ADP since twenty fourteen, but among the players who have gotten there, the numbers are even more dramatic. We've had sixty rookie wide receivers with top one hundred startup ADP since twenty fourteen, About fifty seven percent of them have seen their price increase from one year to the next, From year one to year two, that's a pretty strong investment. At running back, that's nearly identical. It's a little higher than fifty eight percent.

00:09:01
Speaker 2: At tight end.

00:09:02
Speaker 1: We've had seven rookies with top one hundred startup ADPs. Again, the sample size isn't massive, but it's what we're working with here. Only three of them saw that value increase year over year. So at each level, tight ends are improving. They're year one to year two average drapt position in startups at a much lower rate than what we see from wide receivers and running backs, And in general, rookie tight ends are decreasing in value more often than they're increasing in value. But that's also not the whole problem. We could stop there, but we also have to look at market value ceiling here too. How high a player's value can reach is an important component that we absolutely have to factor in. Since twenty fourteen, there's been one tight end one who's had a year two startup ADP higher than forty. That was Kyle Pitts. Only three tight ends were higher than pick seventy two, which represents the first six rounds of a twelve team startup. Again, this is largely because as of supply and demand, tight ends just don't matter that much in fantasy football, so their costs are driven down, even if there're some of the best players at their position. When you select a tight end in your rookie draft, you're not simply selecting them and just moving on. You're taking them over a running back or a wide receiver.

00:10:19
Speaker 2: AKA.

00:10:20
Speaker 1: There's an opportunity cost when you take one of these tight ends, and that's very, very key to this discussion. Maybe think of it this way. A lot of the good tight ends in a rookie draft will generally get drafted in the second or third round. There have been four since twenty eleven who have gone in round one on average, Kyle Pitts, TJ. Hawkinson, Eric Ebrown, and OJ Howard. That's telling us that the majority of pretty good to high end tight ends will go after round one of your rookie draft. So let's look at this startup draft sample and focus on all running backs, wide receivers, and tight ends who are selected in round two or round three of rookie drafts, so after pick twelve but before pick thirty seven. That leaves us with sixty six wide receivers, forty five running backs, and fourteen tight ends. Of those second and third round rookie draft wide receivers, thirty six percent of them were able to give you a top seventy five startup ADP in year two. That number was twenty percent at running back and twenty one percent at tight end. To put that another way, we've got all these wide outs, running backs, and tight ends getting drafted in round two or round three of rookie drafts, so they're all valued similarly entering the league, but wide receivers tend to hit that top seventy five and startup draft ADP the following year. The highest rate. Running backs and tight ends were actually pretty similar. When you increase that to look at top fifty startup ADP, wide receivers hit that market at twenty three percent rate, running backs are at eleven percent, tight ends seven percent, and then when looking at top twenty five startup ADPs five percent of wide receivers from the second and third round of rookie drafts have gotten there, one percent of running backs have gotten there, and absolutely zero tight ends have gotten there. To put this all another way, if you're looking for a ceiling, if you're looking for a player to increase his value by a whole lot and be a top three round pick in dynasty in year two, tight end is absolutely not the way to go. We see running backs get there out of the second and third round of rookie drafts, and we see wide receivers get there too, maybe not frequently, but they get there. Tight Ends literally just never get there. Tight Ends who gets selected in round two or round three of rookie drafts are not seeing year two ADP in the top twenty five or the top thirty. It's just not happening. At least you have a shot at that if you're throwing darts at running backs and wide receivers. So let's wrap this up and talk about what all this data means.

00:12:48
Speaker 2: We're not as good at ranking.

00:12:50
Speaker 1: Tight end's post draft as we are running backs and wide receivers, but I don't think it's significant enough to worry about. When we focus on startup drafts, tight ends tend to not prove on their startup ADP from year one to year two at the same rate as wide receivers and running backs. That's not good for the position. Moreover, and probably the most important piece to this, tight ends rarely have super high costs even after their rookie seasons. When you compare running backs, wide receivers, and tight ends who get drafted in a round two or round three in rookie drafts, the running backs and wide receivers are hitting higher startup ADPs in year two at a much higher rate than tight ends are. If you were to use a rookie pick on a tight end, you're almost admitting that you're not worried about how high of a ceiling that pick may have on the value front. We just don't see tight ends jump into the top three or so rounds of startup drafts very often after year one. It actually hasn't happened outside of Kyle Pitts since twenty fourteen, and he was definitely not a second or third round rookie draft pick. But it does happen at running back and wide receiver. Again, maybe not a ton, but it does happen. That's why investing in rookie tight ends is generally not necessary. At least in a typical non tight end premium league. They may increase their value year over year, but it's generally not by a whole lot, or at least it's generally not to levels where you'd have to give up a ton to acquire them before year two. Now, clearly this is a high level look at the position and how the market works. There may be individual circumstances where it makes plenty of sense to go after a tight end in your rookie draft. It's not an avoid at all cost scenario. This is based on history, and based on history, throwing a dart at running backer wide receiver in the second or third round of your rookie draft has generally been a better idea than going after a tight end. That's going to do it for today's show, though, Thanks to all of you for listening. If you get subscribed to the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found. You know to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. I'm going to check out the Late Round Prospect Guide over on Lateround dot com Otherwise, thanks for listening everyone, I will talk to you later in the week. Two