TE Targets and Fades — Interpreting the Tiers
TE Targets and Fades — Interpreting the Tiers
How important is getting an Elite TE? What alternatives exist?
I got asked a question in my Signals Gold Q&A last night about a pretty shallow 10-team league that only starts two WRs by default and has shallow benches, and I always kind of turn up my nose at these kinds of leagues, but I know many of you play in them.
The issue here is the replacement level is just too high across the board. I talk about the “WR Window,” but in a league like this, that’s not even a thing. Some of the late-window rookies are just going to go undrafted. With an injury before Week 1, a DeAndre Hopkins type might just be available on the wire. Certainly guys like Jakobi Meyers, who are perfectly startable WRs.
As I wrote in my WR Tiers, there’s still an advantage before the first two Big Tier Breaks, but again, with only 10 teams and only a maximum of three WRs starting (including the Flex) — and rosters that are maybe only 13 players deep — you’re talking about an environment where even the teams that ignore WR are able to start options with real upside. The WRs still won’t be perfectly equitably distributed, but these are the leagues that lead to people believing WR is “deep.”
But even though I think these types of settings take a lot of the strategy out of the game, my answer is never just, “Your league is dumb,” without any advice. So what is the way to play such a league? What strategies do exist?
Draft strategy is about scarcity. It’s about understanding where things are not going to be available to you at cheaper costs, or off the waiver wire, and then targeting those things in the higher draft capital rounds. This is particularly true after the first couple rounds — in Rounds 1 and 2, you’re just talking about a list of the very best talents in the NFL, and any of them, at any position, can define the 2024 season. But by the time 25 or so players have been selected, it’s a game of using your resources where they are best served.
My answer to that individual included chasing early RB, and perhaps an early QB. But what I emphasized above all, in even the most shallow league, and even in a year where it’s deeper than ever — Elite TE is a scarce resource. We finished the conversation talking about how viable two early TEs was, to keep them off leaguemates’ rosters, and to increase the probability of a huge hit. Assuming the opportunity cost was low where that strategy might be employed — and the opportunity cost in this shallow draft tends to be low throughout — I loved that idea.
Tight end can be so easily overlooked by fantasy drafters, but its unique value is tied to how few there are. I was also asked in the same stream last night about how I’d rank the Elite TEs in a league that didn’t have a TE position, and you could start them in WR/TE Flex spots. My answer was probably lower than you’d think, somewhere around the second Big Tier Break at WR, because TEs in that setting would mostly lack the statistical upside to really get up there with the best WRs. (Certainly they can get up there, and Travis Kelce did it multiple times in his prime, but so can many WRs, and I like the upside odds for my top-30 WRs or so given I know WRs will run all the routes.) Ultimately, my answer was something like, “I typically just don’t draft TEs in that format.”
Meanwhile, if you get me in an FFPC room, where it’s TE Premium and there are two Flex positions so you could pretty easily justify starting multiple TEs because of how the scoring is juiced, the position becomes that much more imperative for me. What I’m getting at is while TE can be overlooked, it’s also a position that is very format-dependent, and can offer more strategy to consider than most.
And yet it can also offer less. As I started, TE is a scarce position, even in shallow leagues. You’re able to get a real advantage on the other rosters in your league if you have the star. It’s worth seeking.
Let’s seek. Here are the Cliff’s Notes for how I do tiers, with more info in the WR Targets and Fades piece:
Bold means the player is a target, while italics means he’s a fade
The “Big Tier Break” denotes areas where there is a legit cliff
I’ll also use nomenclature like 1a and 1b to denote when there are mini-tier breaks
Let’s do it.