657: Breakout Tight Ends

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Speaker 1: This is the Labor Podcast with your host JJ zacher Retha j J zacher reson. What's up everyone, It's JJ Zacharyson in this episode six hundred and fifty seven of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by FanDuel. Thanks for tuning in. Over the last two weeks, I've gone over how to spot middle round, running back and wide receiver breakouts. To wrap up this little series that I do each year, we're gonna talk through the tight end position today, and unlike wide receiver and running back, I'm not splitting things up by middle and late round tight ends because our sample size is just too small when doing that. So today on this episode, we're gonna find some ways to spot breakout tight ends in your fantasy football drafts. Now, before digging in, I wanted to give a shout to the Established the Run podcast. The podcast is free and it's hosted by two legends in the fantasy space, Adam Levitan and Nevin Silva. You probably remember them from their time at Rotor World. 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If you haven't listened to the episodes on running back and wide receiver breakouts yet, hit pause right now, scroll back in the podcast feed a little bit and listen to those before this one. There's a reason to save this one for last, because it's a little bit different, but I did take a similar approach when trying to find trends for breakout tight ends. I looked at historical average draft position data from Myfantasy League dot Com and I plotted EIGHTP on the X axis for every tight end since twenty eleven, and then I plotted their points per game on the Y axis, so where they were drafted versus how many points they ended up scoring per game, and I only looked at players who played eight or more games. Now, I made a trend line with that data, and that represented expectation. It told us how many points we'd expect a tight end to score per game at a particular ADP. From there, I could see if a tight end over or underperformed versus expectation in the previous studies that I talked through on this show. As I alluded to earlier, I only looked at middle round picks, but since tight ends get drafted at a much lower rate overall, for this particular study, I analyzed every tight end drafted from pick sixty through pick one point eighty around six and a twelve team league three through round fifteen. Because in the end, our goal here is defined ways to spot breakout tight ends. Right, if a tight end is going early in drafts, in the first five rounds or so, he can exceed expectation. Yes, but expectation is pretty high. We're looking for middle and late round values here. That's what I'm referring to when I say breakouts. I'm also referring to players who exceed EIGHTYP expectation. And just like the other studies, I'm looking at players who exceeded AIGHTDP expectation by three points per game and then six points per game. Those are moderate breakouts and true breakouts. So let me just run through this high level data. Since twenty eleven, two hundred and four tight ends have been drafted from pick sixty to oneint eighty while playing eight or more games in the season. Of those two hundred and four, forty ended up being moderate breakouts. They exceeded ADP expectation by three or more points per game. That's a rate of a little less than twenty percent. Meanwhile, just thirteen tight ends exceeded ADP expectation by six or more points per game. That's thirteen out of two hundred and four, or six point four percent of the sample. I may look at different thresholds for tight ends next season. But regardless, I was able to find trends among the players who broke out versus the players who didn't, or things you can look for when drafting a tight end yourself this year. Number one, The first thing to look for in these middle and late round tight ends is finding a tight end who's the top pass catcher being drafted from his actual NFL team. What I mean by that is you've got let's say Dallas Goddard this year getting drafted in the middle rounds, he's not the top pass catcher being selected from the Eagles by adp aj Brown and DeVante Smith generally go ahead of him. Since twenty eleven, we've only had nineteen of these tight ends in our sample of two hundred and four players, but a whopping twenty six point three percent of them were moderate breakouts ten and a half percent of them were true breakouts. Those numbers were significantly better than the tight ends who were drafted second or third from their NFL team. We saw rates from them of about eighteen percent and six percent. One thing to note, though, it doesn't seem to matter if a tight end is second or third in adp on his team. It just matters if he's first, So it wouldn't matter if Goddard leap frogs Devonte Smith and ADP, because he'd still be second on the Eagles in pass catcher ADP behind aj Brown. The next thing to look for quarterback play. Quarterbacks seem to matter more at tight end than they do a wide receiver. If you recall, quarterback ADP didn't matter whatsoever for wide receiver breakouts. In fact, breakout wide receivers typically had quarterbacks with lower average draft positions, not higher ones. But it's different at tight end. Among the tight ends who didn't break out in our sample of two hundred and four, their quarterbacks had an average ADP of about one hundred and seventeen. Moderate breakouts were at one hundred and ten, and true breakouts the real league winners, their quarterbacks had an average ADP of ninety eight ain't. The reason why this is the case is because tight ends generally aren't the first read for a quarterback. Quarterbacks have to progress through their reads to get to tight end, and better quarterbacks are gonna be able to do that faster, and better quarterbacks are generally drafted higher in fantasy football. This data is especially glaring when you look at quarterback groupings. Quarterbacks ranked first through fifth and ADP if they had a tight end drafted in the middle or late rounds. Those tight ends were moderate breakouts at a twenty nine percent rate. Their true breakout rate was almost thirteen percent. No other quarterback grouping had tight ends above eight point three percent and true breakout rate. You may remember this little nugget from last year, and it's what got me on to players like Dawson Knox and the Dallas tight ends which turned into Dalton Schultz. They all ended up exceeding expectation last season, and a huge reason I drafted them was because their quarterback situations were so favorable. Not to that point, you can combine these ideas and look at the negative side too. I met that players who aren't their team's first pass catcher or worse bets and then quarterbacks seems to matter well. In our sample, we had nineteen middle round tight ends, so I'm looking at round six through round nine. Nineteen of them weren't their team's top pass catcher and had a quarterback drafted outside the top sixteen, so they had a wide receiver teammate being drafted ahead of them and their quarterback situation not great. So, for example, that's what TJ. Hockinson is walking into this year. Of those nineteen middle round tight ends, only one of them broke out and it wasn't even a true breakout. It was a moderate breakout. So based strictly on historical ADP and nothing more, TJ. Hockinson would have about a five to six percent chance to just be a moderate breakout. And then age matters too. There's a chart in the late Round Draft guide that shows is better than I can describe on a podcast, but the best years for tight ends are generally year two and year three. Some older tight ends do well too, But one thing that's very obvious is that rookie tight ends not great. Just six percent of them have been moderate breakouts since twenty eleven, and none of them have been true breakouts. And the last thing I want to mention this is also in the draft guide, of course, but it's that athleticism does seem to matter at tight end. It doesn't really matter at all wide receiver, but at tight end you generally should prefer the freak athletes. Here's the problem, though, your consideration set at tight end is usually just a e lead athlete after a lead athlete, after a lead athlete, because tight ends aren't being drafted a whole lot. So it means that the tight ends who are drafted, they're probably pretty good athletes. So let me explain what I mean. The average breakout tight end since twenty eleven has had a height adjusted speed score so weight and height adjusted forty yard dashtime of about one hundred and twelve. Within the general tight end population, the numbers closer to ninety seven, so you might think that athleticism and speed matters right well, The issue is that the non breakout tight ends in our sample, they're height agen us at speed score average is about one hundred and seven, so even those guys are good, even those guys are athletic. I do think that there's some signal to this, though, because if you hit certain thresholds, like if you have a tight end who's in the nineties within that metric, he has a much lower chance of succeeding or beating expectation. And we see this all the time in fantasy football. The truly elite tight ends are generally the guys who are freak athletes. They're monsters, so just don't lose sight of that. So Number one, you want tight ends who are the first pass catchers drafted from their NFL team. You generally want to avoid middle round tight ends too, which is something I talk about a lot in the Late Round Draft Guide, but you definitely want to avoid them if they have a bottom tiered quarterback by ADP and if a tight end has a good quarterback, that's a good sign. I wouldn't go nuts looking at it in a black and white way, since mobility at the quarterback position is driving some of these players up draft boards. But I would just generally look for tight ends attached to good quarterbacks as just a general rule of thumb, and then you want those guys to be beasts as athletes. It's pretty straightforward. The problem is not a whole lot of tight ends this year really fit that criteria. I do think this should get you onto Gerald Everett, though he's someone I've been drafting a lot now that he's in LA with Justin Herbert. Those types of tight ends have done pretty well in the past, but it's definitely a year where there's not so many clearcut options at tight end. I don't mean that as the position is bad. I actually think there are pretty good late round options. I mean it from the perspective that not a ton of them fit this criteria flawlessly, but you at least now have some of that criteria. You can use it yourself, and if you're curious, I've got some of my favorite tight ends listed in the Late Round Draft Guide, which you can get right now over on lateround dot com. That's gonna do it for today's show, though, Thanks to all of you for listening. If you get subscribed to Late Round Fantasy Football podcast, make sure you are by searching forward pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found a different to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks everyone, I'll talk to you later in the week.