Tight End By Committee

Photo: USA Today Sports

Over the past several seasons, there have been quite a few very popular articles that look at an interesting approach to building a fantasy team with late value picks. Based on the theory of using both Strength of Schedule ("SOS") and taking two players as a combination to build one very good starting duo, a Tight End by Committee ("TEBC") can be built as a standard fantasy league strategy. In general, this is usually a wise move because very early on in fantasy drafts there are a ton of running back and wide receiver prospects to go after to build a great team. While there are a few studs at tight end, there is rarely a need to pursue an elite option very hard in the beginning stages of a fantasy draft.

So with this in mind, this article will apply the normal method applied to the other positions (running back and wide receiver) for the tight end position. Let's take a look at how to go about building this committee and then we can digest and discuss the results.

(TIGHT) END GAME

So how to begin? Defenses and quarterbacks are relatively easy to committee together. There's usually only one quarterback and certainly only one team defense per NFL club, so the approach is pretty simple as far as picking out which players/teams to try and pair up. When it comes to tight ends, the line is not quite so easy to draw, but I needed some basis to pick which players it made sense to try and combine for a decent committee. I decided that I would use the following criteria to decide which players to start with for evaluating:

CRITERIA #1 - TE12 AND BEYOND

This seems pretty simple. If we want to have a duo that puts up TE1 numbers, that means we want TE12 or better production - else we would just draft TE12 or higher and forget the whole idea. So here is the list of players with which I started, based on their average draft position (ADP):

Tight Ends TE12-TE30 Based on ADP

To be thorough, the list goes all the way to TE30 because of how murky the waters (and depth charts) get after the lower end of the TE2 range (TE20+). Taking the Top 30 tight ends from the ADP list and removing the Top 11 leaves 19 guys to pair up and see how they do. That makes 171 potential committees, so there had better be a decent one (or several, we hope) out of all of those couplets. Now, before I go over the method of how to pair them up and the results, we need one more rule:

CRITERIA #2 - NO MORE THAN ONE TE FROM ROUND 10 AND ONE FROM ROUND 12

This could get tricky here, but understand the overall goal. The point of TEBC is to free up the first 9-10 rounds of your fantasy draft to pursue all of the other positions for your team. Grabbing three or four running backs and four or five receivers after grabbing a stud running back or wide receiver in Round 1 sounds like a good idea to me. This also gives you the flexibility of grabbing a stud quarterback, depending on your personal preference, or even to get TE1 if there's a huge value play available and have the TEBC be your TE2 (although I would only recommend this in very deep leagues with 20+ roster spots). Flexibility is the name of the game here. We all want value in our drafts, and having the ability to grab lots of running backs and wide receivers in the first 9-10 Rounds gives us that ability.

Here is the good news - all of the tight ends on the list above have ADPs that are Round 10 or higher (later). In fact, only Delanie Walker has an ADP in Round 11, with everyone else presently either in Round 12 or later. That screams value to me and a great year for the TEBC approach.

So what do we do now to figure out some tight end pairs?

CRITERIA #3 - USE FOOTBALLGUYS' TE STRENGTH OF SCHEDULE

This sounds pretty simple, doesn't it? Just take the tight end strength of schedule to figure out when certain players are more likely to score well. What I did is similar to what the Projections Dominator and Draft Dominator do for you - take the projected fantasy points and slice them up over 17 weeks based on the strength of schedule. I call this result the distributed fantasy points for each tight end.

After I had all 19 tight ends with distributed fantasy points on a weekly basis, I just compared all of the possible tight end pairs to find the best duos for TEBC. So here we are - time for some results.

Tight End Committee Pairs

We have some very good pairs to select from for TEBC. There are 48 pairs that are worth more than Kyle Rudolph (projected as TE12) by his lonesome, who is projected to produce 139.3 points this season. Let's also take a look at how often some of these guys show up on the table:

Tight End Committee Pair Appearances by Player

The results are dominated by four guys – Kyle Rudolph, Delanie Walker, Jack Doyle and Mark Andrews – which is a little surprising as two of these tight ends are TE19 (Andrews) and TE20 (Doyle) according to ADP. Given that every other tight end only appears five times or less, we should not be surprised if these eight tight ends comprise our top options for tight end by committee, but let's be thorough and complete the analysis with a closer look at all of the results.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

Now that we have 48 possible pairs that are better than Kyle Rudolph alone, what exactly does that mean? Should Rudolph be the basis of our comparison? Of course not. Remember our goal - find a pair of tight ends that can combine for TE1-type fantasy production. To figure that out we need a better metric, so here are the projections for the Top 20 TEs in PPR scoring:

Projected Fantasy Points for Top 12+ ADP TEs

We see that the top options are pretty well defined with Travis Kelce far and away as the #1 choice, and then Zack Ertz and George Kittle rounding out the Top 3. The next group of TE1 options (TE4-10) are certainly up for debate. O.J. Howard (ADP of TE4) is above four tight ends (Evan Engram, Huner, Henry, Jared Cook and Vance McDonald) that are projected to score as many or more points as Howard speaks to that jumbled group. The fact that Kyle Rudolph and Delanie Walker are so close to Eric Ebron's and David Njoku's projections make Rudolph and Walker very attractive target for later round selections.

So how best to evaluate the TEBC pairs from Table 2 against the top tight ends? The best way is to pick a baseline of one of the worst projected Top 10 tight end (Eric Ebron, 140.5 points projected) and add 6-9 points for a bye week filler tight end to cover Ebron's bye week. That creates a baseline score in the 146.5-149.5 range. Casting our gaze back at Table 2, the Top 20 tight end pairs all come in at 146.5 points or more, with the Top 12 all above 150 points - above our baseline high water mark of 149.5 projected points. This tells us that choosing the correct pair can give us the result we wanted - TE1 production on the cheap.

Considering all of the results, the TEBC committee recipe for 2019 is sort of a "Pick 2" choice between Delanie Walker, Kyle Rudolph and Jack Doyle. Selecting Walker in Round 9 or 10 (at or above his Round 10 ADP) affords you the option of pairing him with several different TE2 options. The safest path for the second tight end in the duo is to take Kyle Rudolph in the Round 13-14 range, but that skips over the top option of Jack Doyle. Waiting another round or two to take Doyle could cause you some stress, but know that Mark Andrews is there as a fallback plan. The safest plan is to take Walker and then take Doyle well ahead of his Round 16 ADP just to secure the top duo.

So what happens if someone else grabs Walker even before you can get to him? Just pivot to Kyle Rudolph a round or two later and then take Doyle - with the fallback to Andrews as before. Be sure to secure either Walker, Rudolph ahead of their ADP because the only "Disaster Plan" is to take Doyle and Mark Andrews - which is still a Top 10 pairing - but that might be a bit risky to count on later in your draft.

Three example schedules are provided for my favorite three TEBC options this season. Here I give you the best weekly plays for each tight end, based on projections.

Suggested TEBC Schedule Plan - Delanie Walker and Jack Doyle

Suggested TEBC Schedule Plan - Delanie Walker and Kyle Rudolph

Suggested TEBC Schedule Plan - Kyle Rudolph and Jack Doyle

The committee approach is not a perfect one, but having this knowledge prior to your fantasy draft can prove to be invaluable if you decide to adopt this approach. If all the players on your starter list are gone, going with a committee can save your team and help you deal with the loss of bigger names. The method is also a big help in best-ball leagues, where lineup decisions are not necessary every week. That's exactly where a committee can do the best, as either player can count for you each week.

Questions, suggestions, and comments are always welcome to pasquino@footballguys.com.

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