999: The Tight End Dead Zone

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Speaker 1: This is the Labor Podcast with your host JJ Zachertha j J Zachers. What's up everyone, It's JJ zacharyesin in this episode nine ninety nine of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by DraftKings. Thanks for tuning in. Football season is right around the corner, and there's no better way to lock in your fantasy dominance early than with Best Ball on DraftKings, where you draft once and ride your roster all season long. And right now, DraftKings giving all customers a can't miss offer. Draft one, get one, enter a lineup in the fifteen million dollars Best Ball contest for just twenty dollars, and you'll score another Best Ball ticket to play free for share of that fifteen million dollars, giving you a second chance to win big. It's easy. Just draft your dream team once, no weekly management required, and let your top scorers automatically start each week across the whole season. 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Eligibillionstriction supply voidware prohibited. One per customer enter the Best Ball fifteen million dollars headliner contests by nine to four to twenty five to get one bonus entry twenty dollars INTR required. Reward expires in thirty days. See terms at DraftKings dot com. Slash NFL Dash Best Ball sponsored by DK I've been distancing myself from the concept of the running back dead zone a bit this year, and really and extended from some research that I did last year. Anyone who's been consuming everything that I've been doing might have picked up on that, with a dead zone looking different in twenty twenty four than it had in a pass pre draft. But beyond that, I think we've done a little bit too much generalizing with the running back dead zone. The intent on my end was to use it as more of a quick reference, to quickly explain that there's an area of fantasy drafts where running back hit rates start to decline and there's no reason to reach for running backs in that area of your draft. And that's still true, But as I've alluded to recently on the show, I've found myself constantly finding player archetypes who end up emerging from the dead zone over and over again. It's more of an archetype zone than it is a dead zone at the end of the day, and it's probably easier to think of it that way versus how the dead zone is often form. Now, as you saw with the title of today's episode, we're not talking about running backs, but we are talking about dead zones because there's something that I've been talking about for years and that other analysts have been talking about for years, but it still doesn't seem to get enough love in the fantasy football space. We can call it the tight end dead zone. I don't really care. That was just the easiest way to sort of get the concept of this episode across in a title. I'll probably eventually do the same thing that I'm doing with the running back dead zone and say let's stop calling it that in like five or six years. But regardless of those semantics, there's definitely an area of your drafts where you should think twice before snagging a tight end. That's what this is all about. This episode is gonna strongly lean on the Late Round Draft Guide. I put a lot of research into that thing, and you can get your copy right now over on Lateround dot com. You can see all of the data from today's show in action, and you can see how it impacts this season in particular. But this episode, the data in the episode, it's gonna largely stem from that guide. It's just a fraction of what you get in that guide too. But the tight end dead zone, let's talk about this idea. Last year in twenty twenty four the tight end landscape was different in fantasy football. I podcasted about it, I wrote about it, and I was also more or less wrong with the conclusion that I drew from my research. You win some, you lose some. Essentially, we were looking at a tight end group last year that was cheaper than it had ever really been, or at least the top of the position was the tight end one was being drafted eleven overall spots later than the average that we had seen from twenty fourteen to twenty twenty three. The tight end two was being drafted later as well, as was the tight end three. But then when you got to the tight end four, the tight end five to the tight end six, the tight end four to the tight end eight were all drafted higher than we'd typically seen. To put that all another way, tight ends were bunched together last year at the top of drafts. You might remember that it was guys like Kelsey McBride Andrew pits kincaid. The market couldn't make up its mind. There weren't obvious go tos at the position, but there were a lot of candidates to be those go tos. And my takeaway was that even when you removed Travis Kelcey and Rob Gronkowski from historical data. We often did see high end tight ends emerge in fantasy football, so chances were a couple of those high end players would do the same thing last year, and you were getting them at a discount, which was kind of nice. But we didn't get enough breakouts or big seasons from that group. We did get Trey McBride and George Kittle, but then the other player who came through who really emerged as this big superstar was Brock Bauers. He was drafted a little bit later. Basically I thought maybe we'd see like three early round guys hit, but it was just two and it wasn't the two that were drafted at the very top. Kittle wasn't the top three tight end by ADP. Some R squared analysis really paints this picture. Our square where is the coefficient of determination. In mathematics, it's the proportion of the variation of the dependent variable that is predictable from the independent variable or variables. Basically, an R squared of one or one hundred percent means there's perfect correlation and that one variable explains the other variable perfectly. At zero or zero percent. The opposite is happening now. I like doing average draft position analysis through the lens of R squared. I look at positional ADP and then I look at PPR points per game by players in a given season. I then find the R squared between those two variables. That essentially tells us how much average draft position helped explain a player's actual result. Let's think about why this is so important. Imagine a world where top five running backs were consistently giving you a massive edge over your competition. Like year in and year out, you knew that having a top five running back was a big, big deal, which it is that may make you want to draft running backs early in your fantasy drafts. Right. However, one if the RS squared between running back average draft position and running back actual result was next to nothing, meaning where you drafted your running back it wasn't really explaining how well that running back would end up performing. Then you probably wouldn't care to draft one early because you could just get one later who would finish with just as good of odds to be the RB one to be a top five guy back. When late round quarterbacking was the most obvious fantasy strategy on the planet. If you go back to twenty fifteen, there was no correlation between a top eighteen quarterback and how many points per game he actually scored. Top nine quarterbacks that year were no better than the next nine quarterbacks by ADP. In that case, if you drafted a quarterback early, you were drafting a terrible fantasy value. So think about that with tight ends. If you look at top twelve tight ends by average draft position, let's say, and there's really strong correlation between a tight end being selected in the top twelve and how many fantasy points per game that tight end actually scored, then that's better for early round tight end drafters because it's telling them and showing them that the earlier the pick, generally speaking, the higher the points per game output. And through the years you get variation with this kind of thing. Some years, like in twenty seventeen, you'll get great correlation among top twelve tight ends. That year saw an R square of point seventy three when looking at top twelve tight ends and where they were drafted versus how many fantasy points they actually scored. And then sometimes you get the twenty twenty four season. Last year we had absolutely zero correlation and our squared value of literally zero between top twelve tight ends where they were drafted and how many PPR points per game they actually scored. They were totally unpredictable things to brock Bauer's performance on one end and then some busts on the other end. So that helps explain what I was talking about when I said last year's results weren't the best for tight end drafters. You could have just thrown a dart at a top twelve tight end and had just as good of a shot at a tight end one season as someone drafting the actual tight end one by ADP. That's essentially what that's saying. Now heading into twenty twenty five, things have normalized a bit. We've got a more clear cut tight end picture. It looks like a tight end landscape that were generally used to seeing with a few obvious guys at the top. What I want to look at and discuss is doing the same R squared exercise, but for tight ends outside the obvious elite tier, the elite tier where we've had Gronkowski and Kelsey and Andrews and a lot of Kittle in the past. In the draft guide, I labeled this area as tight ends drafted after tight end six and through tight end eighteen. These were the non elite tight ends who were selected in most fantasy drafts. They're the guys who aren't your primary targets, but they're still players who are either high end backups or actual starters on your fantasy team. Since twenty fourteen, which is where the ADP data from fantasydata dot Com dates back to, we've had one hundred and fifteen tight ends drafted in that tight end seven to tight end eighteen area who played eight or more games in their analyze season. So if a player didn't play eight or more games, he's not part of this data set. We want to have a meaningful sample to judge someone's performance, So one hundred and fifteen sort of middle to late round tight ends. Anyone want to guess the rs squared between those tight ends average draft positions and the titands PPR points per game averages point zero four, it's essentially non existent. To put that another way, the high end part of that sample the guys ranked as the tight end seven, the tight end e to the tight end nine. Historically, the low part of that sample has done pretty much just as well, and that low end part of the sample is the tight end fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen by ADP, and that tells you that there's almost zero reason to reach for players in this range when you know there's no correlation between where these dudes are being drafted and how they actually perform. But just like the running back dead zone, there are archetypes that you should be looking for players who can still emerge from this range. For instance, tight ends in this range, the one hundred and fifteen that we're analyzing here, when they've been in bad offenses, they've been very bad against cost. Twenty four tight ends from this range were in offenses that scored fewer than two offensive touchdowns per game. Of those twenty four, there's only been one who beat his average draft position expectation by four more PPR points per game, meaning where he was drafted said he should have scored X number of points per game, and he exceeded that by four or more points. Only one of the twenty four in a bad offense was able to do that, and that one tight end was freaking Brock Bowers, one of the best tight end prospects of this era. Now another thing to think about in this range is age. Just like the running back dead zone, the younger the tight end, the better the outcomes generally are. And then, arguably most important, you've got teammate competition. There are a lot of ways to measure this, but the way I do this in the guide is by simply looking at how many teammate wide receivers the tight end has in the top forty eight at the wide receiver position. That's by ADP. When there's more competition, we generally see worse outcomes for these tight ends. In fact, when tight ends have more competition, their likelihood of breaking out and far exceeding ADP expectation is essentially cut in half. Now, when we see that there's no correlation between where a tight end seven to tight end eighteen is drafted and how many PPR points per game that tight end is actually going to score, we've got to wonder why I always need some explanation when the data is saying something kind of wild. And I think the reason we see this kind of thing happening, this dead zone happening, I think it's even more obvious than it is at running back. Like with running backs, I've always said that it's a supply and demand thing. That's why the running back dead zone has been a thing has historically. Fantasy gamers know how important running back is, and they push up players who shouldn't be pushed up based on projected workload. But those players are often inferior talents. They're not locked into that workload. There are only so many Bellcals in the NFL, making it harder for those dead zone running backs to give us a truly elite fantasy season. The masses draft some Mere White as an RB two when there's absolutely no reason to draft some Mere White as an RB two. It's kind of the same idea for tight ends. Not many tight ends are projected to see high target shairs, so the highly targeted tight ends they're pretty rare. But tight ends also just score fewer points. Their points are scrunched together, which means one touchdown, one big play, one broken play, and all of a sudden, that tight end is usable in a given week. Now. I haven't played the new Mario Kart, but I imagine it's like that, where everyone's in their spot, they all have their kind of place in the race, and then the items start getting used and everything shifts back and forth constantly in the standings. It's like that there's not much stability at tight end. Things are always moving. That creates a lot of variance among the players who aren't elite, who aren't seeing those massive target shairs. And there are many many players who fall into that category. There are very few who are actually seeing great target shairs. Now. I talk plenty in the draft guide about the top six guys and whether you should be in or out on those guys this year, and I'm actually into some of the tight ends that are in this tight end seven to tight end eighteen range. But I do think people need to realize that traditionally there's been a massive dead zone, a tight end that stretches across many rounds of your fantasy draft. It tells you that generally speaking, if you're not getting a high end tight end and early round tight end, you really really should wait, and you should really really think deeply about that middle round tight end that you're about to draft, because as oftentimes it's a really bad fantasy selection. And look, this is not a new concept, but it's one that all of us should be reminded about every once in a while. And this right now. This is your reminder. That's it for today's show, though, thanks to all of you for listening. If you subscribe to the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast, make sure you are by starving for it pretty much anywhere podcast can be found, and know if it's follow me on Twitter and on Blue Sky at Late Round QB. Thanks for listening everyone. We're back on our normal schedule, so becoming a best ball bro be out tomorrow. The Late Round Fantasy Football show will be on YouTube on Thursday, which is on YouTube dot com slash at Late Round FF and then I've got a great perspective's guest later in the week, and you can always check out what I'm doing over on lateround dot com, including the Draft guide, which you can purchase right now. I'll talk to you guys tomorrow