829: Mailbag 11/3/23

JJ Zachariason (0:02)

This is the Late Round Podcast with your host, JJ Zacharissa.

What's up, everyone? It's JJ Zachariason in this episode 829 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, sponsored by FanDuel. Thanks for tuning in. Before getting to the mail-back questions this week, I want to send you another reminder about The Late-Round Fantasy Football Patreon. With The Patreon, you get live-stream Q&As, rest-of-season rankings and tiers, weekly rankings and tiers, a great Discord community and more. You can learn more about it over on lateraound.com.

The first question this week is from Twitter. It's from at fantasy fbell. It says, It feels like tight end is deeper than ever this year with Hawkinson, Laporta, etc. Does the data support this? So there are a lot of ways to answer a question like this, because the definition of deep is subjective. But I'll look at a couple of angles here. I'll start by just comparing the tight end 18 or a mid-range tight end 2, the tight end 12, and the tight end 6 to how those players performed historically.

Right now, the tight end 18 in points per game is Hunter Henry, who's at 7.4. Last season among tight ends with eight or more games played, the tight end 18 was at 8.4 PPR points per game. But during the four years prior to that, the tight end 18 averages 6.3 points per game. So we're looking better this year than the previous five year average, except in 2022 when the number was actually higher. That's for tight end 18 For a mid-range tight end 2, let's look at the tight end 12

This year, the tight end 12 is David Njoku. He's averaging 8.8 PPR points per game. Last year, the tight end 12 was at 9.2. And the five year average prior to this season has been 9.8. So, this season has been worse in the tight end 12 spot, a low end tight end 1 The tight end 6 this season is Evan Ingram at 11.6 PPR points per game. Last year, that tight end 6 was at 12.9 points per game. The five year average, 12.4. So, from that perspective, the tight end position has actually been a little bit worse this year than previous years, especially the top 12 But that definitely doesn't tell us the whole story. On top of this, there's some VORP analysis that needs to be done. Like Mark Andrews right now is the tight end 2 He's averaging 15.4 PPR points per game. Well, the tight end 2 over the last five years has scored almost 17 points per game. The tight end 3 this season is basically at the five year average.

What that means is that the whole position is essentially scoring fewer points. If the high end players were scoring fewer points and the low end players were scoring more points, then we could probably say the tight end is deeper. And maybe it is to some degree, given how the tight end 18 was performing. But I don't think the data is screaming that to us. Now, with that being said, you could also look at this from the perspective of hit rate. Are tight ends performing well after being drafted late in your fantasy drafts? For example, if the tight end 1 this season was drafted as the tight end 14, and the tight end 2 was the tight end 18 during the fantasy drafts, you might be thinking that the position is then deep, because you got these huge difference makers late in your draft. Now, when you look at the early round tight ends, the tight end 1 and ADP, that's Travis Kelcey, he's currently the tight end 1 The tight end 2, that was Mark Andrews, he's currently the tight end 2 TJ Hawkinson, he was the tight end 3 during fantasy drafts, and he's the tight end 3 right now.

So none of that information would be good for the tight end as deep argument. But Sam Laporta has been a massive value. And what you might be feeling is the Laporta effect, where he was drafted late, and he's giving you week in and week out production. We didn't really see that last season. When I look at my ADP database, and look at expected points per game via ADP versus actual points per game, and what I mean by that is, every player has some sort of points per game expectation at a particular average draft position. I then look to see which players outperform that expectation, or who failed to live up to that expectation. Last season, we only had one tight end outperform that expectation by more than three PPR points per game. That was Evan Ingram. This season, it's looking like Sam Laporta is going to be that player who really exceeds his ADP expectation. But also maybe Colcomet, maybe Logan Thomas, Jake Ferguson, Dalton Kincaid, maybe Trey McBride. There's a chance that that happens, and I stress the word chance.