There is one position in fantasy football that can have the biggest impact in the fantasy football playoffs, and it’s the one that causes us the most headaches: tight ends. Whether your fantasy football roster build is Hero RB, Zero RB, or even Robust RB, hitting on tight end can absolutely change your fortunes. In this article, we’re going to look at why now is the time to be aggressive at the position if you want to strike it big in fantasy football in 2024.
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Fantasy Football Strategy: How to Handle Tight End
Here is our fantasy football draft strategy for how to approach the tight end position in 2024.
Drafting Tight Ends Early
In 2022, six tight ends were drafted in the first six rounds. In 2023, that number dropped down to five, and now in 2024, we’re up to seven tight ends taken in those first 72 picks. The market is telling us that they have more confidence in the early tight ends than ever before, but that confidence doesn’t extend to the top two rounds of drafts. Zero tight ends are taken there for the first time in three years, and only one tight end is being taken inside the top 36, again the lowest number in three years.
The veterans are falling but nobody has quite enough faith to take the young shiny tight ends really highly just yet. Now, all of the tight ends in this range might have questions surrounding them, and we’ll get into that later, but first, let’s talk about why drafters might not be willing to take these tight ends earlier than they are already.
Madison Parkhill wrote recently in his article “Tight End Spike Weeks are a Playoff Skeleton Key”:
No elite tight end separated in any playoff week in 2023. In weeks 15-17, the top elite tight end scored 9.3 points (TE11), 16.1 (TE1) points, and 7.6 points (TE16). With two horrible weeks, and a solid but unspectacular week 16, this was a bad outcome for the elite tight ends, and very unlikely.
Madison projected this outcome at less than a 15% chance:
In addition to the poor performance from the elite TEs, a late-round TE smashed. In week 15, Sam LaPorta dropped 26.1 points, which was the third-highest TE score of the season. In effect, it was the combination of the bad performance by the elite tight ends with the added late-round tight end smash that crippled their advance rates and performances.
That lasting memory seems to be having a massive effect on drafters. Travis Kelce was disappointing in the regular season, averaging 42 yards and zero touchdowns per game over his last four fantasy-relevant games, but if he’d finished the fantasy season with the stats he put up in the playoffs, would things be different? He went nuclear in the four playoff games with 88.75 yards per game and 0.75 touchdowns per game.
Trey McBride was one of the breakout players of 2023, but finished Week 16 & 17 with a combined 79 scoreless yards, failing to help anyone in the fantasy playoffs. Mark Andrews and TJ Hockenson both missed this part of the year with injuries. George Kittle had seven top 5 weekly finishes but also had seven finishes outside the top 20 tight ends, which is a miserable line at the onesie position.
Dalton Kincaid smashed in games without Dawson Knox, scoring 11.12 half PPR points, double the amount he averaged in games with Knox. However, Knox isn’t going anywhere, so even without Stefon Diggs there are those of us who are skeptical about an every-down role in 2024. Kyle Pitts… Well, he had Arthur Smith and Desmond Ridder to contend with, so being optimistic about his glow-up isn’t hard.
As for Sam LaPorta, who had the greatest rookie tight end season of all time, perhaps people are just wary that his touchdowns might regress. Touchdowns are one of the least sticky stats in football and if LaPorta had scored three fewer touchdowns, in line with nearly all the top options at the position, then his total points and points per game for the season would have dropped him to TE4. That’s a big difference.
Tight Ends: Playoffs Difference Makers
The reason we can’t ignore these elite tight ends is because of what they can do for us in the fantasy football playoffs.
In 2023 Pat Kerrane, the winner of Underdog’s Best Ball Mania 3 wrote in his article “Elite TE is Going Out of Style… but it’s Going Out on Top”:
Despite a quiet Week 17, Kittle was on my winning BBM3 lineup, as well as the winning FFPC lineup. And interestingly, despite it being a total points (Weeks 1-17) contest, he was also on the winning Drafters lineup. So whether looking at half PPR, full PPR, or TE premium, and whether looking at the playoffs or total points through Week 17… you wanted Kittle on your team last season.
This held true in 2023 as Sam LaPorta, the TE1 overall, finished as the TE5 overall in Week 17, a week after finishing as the TE37 in Week 16. But in Week 15, LaPorta gave playoff teams in the first round a turbo boost with 26.1 half PPR points, propelling them into the next rounds.
LaPorta was on both the DraftKings Milly Maker winning team & the Best Ball Mania 4 winning team. Much like Kittle in 2022, he’d gotten teams there and then didn’t bust when it mattered.
Sam LaPorta was the only TE with two games over 24.5 half PPR points all season, and both games came after Week 12 when teams needed those super-fuelled performances to carry them to the playoffs.
How to Handle the Tight End Position: Conclusion
The cost of the high-end tight ends is steep, generally speaking, but we want a difference-maker at the position, and seasons like the one Sam LaPorta just put up can be few and far between. When it comes to the tight end position it’s better to lean into what we can trust than taking dart throws at a position that frequently fails.
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