TE Targets and Fades — How to play the tiers
We have a deeper top group than we have in some years
The TE position is such an interesting one for fantasy, unique in what it brings to any build, while also being probably more straightforward in how to play it than it seems.
Over recent years, the answer has been this “Great or Late” strategy I’ve mentioned before. (And by the way, at a time when I’m doing my absolute best to get to all the questions, one thing I’d note is that if you go to bengretch.substack.com and scroll back through the archives to 2022, a lot of these topics from auction strategy, to positional approaches like this TE note, to the mailbags I wrote about how I’d approach tons of different league types — those are all still somewhat applicable, if obviously not perfectly tied to the 2023 player pool. I’m going to be trying to get through as many of those topics as possible, but just noting this for those of you who are eager to read more.)
But that “Great or Late” strategy is fairly simple — if you’re in a room where TE becomes a solid value, or you are in a draft type where you have the flexibility for another early detour in the high-leverage rooms, you can supercharge any build by going after one of the very top TE names. That doesn’t always pan out — TEs do bust at a decent clip, and there’s risk there. But the general idea from the 7 Pillars post last year hitting on “the potential gap the high-end TEs can provide [last] year” was accurate for Travis Kelce, who lapped the field.
But whereas I was concerned about the next tier of TEs last year, and especially concerned after my TE5 came off the board, this year there’s a much cleaner group of options in that nonelite-but-still-single-digit-rounds range. That said, after my “Big Tier Break” below, you can just push the position to the very end; the “Late” part of the “Great or Late” idea is alive and very well, thank you, as this might be one of the most interesting crops of late-round TE options I can remember.
So there are ultimately a lot of ways to play the position, and yet the Great or Late idea does live on.
Before I jump into the tiers, I just want to follow up one more time on tonight’s Signals Gold livestream at 8 pm ET. The link for that will come in a separate email sent to Gold subscribers closer to that time, so keep an eye out in your inbox. I have the video set up and believe I’ve done it correctly, so it’s just a matter of emailing you guys that link around that time. If you want to participate and ask questions, you’ll need to create a YouTube account (note that the videos will be unlisted and not accessible by random YouTube searches and those types of things).
If you need a walkthrough of how the tiers work, there’s more in the intro to the RB Tiers piece, but the Cliff’s Notes are:
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
You can also find the QB Tiers breakdown here, and the full rankings document here. Let’s get to the TEs.
Tier 1
1. Travis Kelce
The whole question with Travis Kelce is health, because otherwise there’s nothing in his profile that is concerning. The silliest Kelce stat is that he posted a career-high TPRR last year, and he did so while leading the TE position in routes, which also led to him posting career highs in targets and receptions. So, he was up to being the focal point of the passing game after the Tyreek Hill trade.
While I think Kelce absolutely belongs in the first round of fantasy drafts, I’m never thrilled to take him. That said, I’ve already taken him twice at the 1.03 in Main Events at the TE Premium site FFPC — I reviewed one of those drafts here.
Tier 2
2. Mark Andrews
It’s weird at the top of the TE position, where you could make a case for some of those a/b tier breaks, but I do think Kelce is the clear top tier guy, and Mark Andrews is in his own clear next tier.
My buddy Pat Kerrane recently wrote a great breakdown of Andrews’ profile at his site, Legendary Upside, noting that for the various advanced elements of a tight end’s profile he’s looking at, Andrews checks all the boxes.
Andrews can be taken within my second tier of at both WR and RB, near the top of it in TE Premium and ahead of some of the names toward the back of that group in non-TE Premium, around the early Round 3 range in your typically 12-team PPR format. If you’re in smaller leagues, elite onesie options become better bets, and so somewhat counterintuitively Andrews becomes a pretty viable second-round pick in a 10-team (or smaller) league. Part of the reasoning there is that your third-round pick gets stronger in that format, and you can be looking at a flat tier at other positions that doesn’t make sense to reach into in the second round if you can just lock in Andrews and get a similar player to your second-round alternatives in the third.
I could see prioritizing one of the big three QBs over Andrews, but part of the reason I don’t have a lot of exposure to my top tier of QBs is that when I do go away from RB or WR in this range, I do tend to prioritize Andrews.