999: The Tight End Dead Zone

JJ Zachariason (0:11)

What's up, everyone? It's JJ Zachariason. In this episode, 999 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, sponsored by DraftKings. Thanks for tuning in. Football season is right around the corner, and there's no better way to lock in your fantasy dominance early than with Best Ball on DraftKings, where you draft once and ride your roster all season long. And right now, DraftKings is giving all customers a can't-miss offer. Draft one, get one. Enter a lineup in the $15 million Best Ball Contest for just $20, and you'll score another Best Ball ticket to play free for a share of that $15 million, giving you a second chance to win big. It's easy. Just draft your dream team once, no weekly management required, and let your top scorers automatically start each week. Across the whole season, every breakout star, every clutch play, every touchdown will count towards your quest of a share of that $15 million. As you know, I'm drafting over there and I'm documenting things with becoming a Best Ball bro. So you can use that information from that show to help you out as well. So download the DraftKings Daily Fantasy app now to draft your $20 Best Ball lineup to play for a share of $15 million, and get a second ticket to play free for a share of that $15 million. That's two chances to win big without ever setting your lineup again. Draft one, get one, only on DraftKings. The crown is yours. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER in New York. Call 8778-HOPE-NY or text HOPE-NY to 467369 in Connecticut. Help is available for problem gambling. Call 888-789-7777 or visit ccpg.org. 18 plus in most eligible states, but age varies by jurisdiction. Eligibility restrictions apply, void where prohibited, one per customer. Enter the Best Ball $15 million headliner contest by 9-425 to get one bonus entry. $20 entry required, reward expires in 30 days. See terms at draftkings.com/nfldashbestdashball.

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I've been distancing myself from the concept of the running back dead zone a bit this year, and really it extended from some research that I did last year. Anyone who's been consuming everything that I've been doing might have picked up on that, with the dead zone looking different in 2024 than it had in the past pre-draft. But beyond that, I think we've done a little bit too much generalizing with the running back dead zone. The intent on my end was to use it as more of a quick reference, to quickly explain that there's an area of fantasy drafts where running back hit rates start to decline, and there's no reason to reach for running backs in that area of your draft. And that's still true. But as I've alluded to recently on the show, I've found myself constantly finding player archetypes who end up emerging from the dead zone, over and over again. It's more of an archetype zone than it is a dead zone at the end of the day. And it's probably easier to think of it that way, versus how the dead zone is often framed. Now, as you saw with the title of today's episode, we're not talking about running backs, but we are talking about dead zones. Because there's something I've been talking about for years, and that other analysts have been talking about for years, but it still doesn't seem to get enough love in the fantasy football space. We can call it the tight end dead zone. I don't really care. That was just the easiest way to sort of get the concept of this episode across in a title. I'll probably eventually do the same thing that I'm doing at the running back dead zone and say, let's stop calling it that in like five or six years. But regardless of those semantics, there's definitely an area of your drafts where you should think twice before snagging a tight end. That's what this is all about. This episode is going to strongly lean on the Late-Round Draft Guide. I put a lot of research into that thing, and you can get your copy right now over on lateround.com. You can see all of the data from today's show in action, and you can see how it impacts this season in particular. But this episode, the data in the episode, it's going to largely stem from that guide. It's just a fraction of what you get in that guide too. But the tight end dead zone, let's talk about this idea. Last year in 2024, the tight end landscape was different in fantasy football. I podcasted about it, I wrote about it, and I was also more or less wrong with the conclusion that I drew from my research. You win some, you lose some. Essentially, we were looking at a tight end group last year that was cheaper than it had ever really been. Or at least the top of the position was. The tight end one was being drafted 11 overall spots later than the average that we had seen from 2014 to 2023 The tight end two was being drafted later as well, as was the tight end three. But then when you got to the tight end four, the tight end five, the tight end six, the tight end four to the tight end eight were all drafted higher than we had typically seen. To put that all another way, tight ends were bunched together last year at the top of drafts. You might remember that. It was guys like Kelsey, McBride, Andrews, Pitts, Kincaid. The market couldn't make up its mind. There weren't obvious go-tos at the position, but there were a lot of candidates to be those go-tos. And my takeaway was that even when you removed Travis Kelsey and Rob Gronkowski from historical data, we often did see high-end tight ends emerge in fantasy football. So chances were, a couple of those high-end players would do the same thing last year, and you were getting them at a discount, which was kind of nice. But we didn't get enough breakouts or big seasons from that group. We did get Trey McBride and George Kittle. But then the other player who came through who really emerged as this big superstar was Brock Bowers. He was drafted a little bit later. Basically, I thought maybe we'd see like three early-round guys hit, but it was just two, and it wasn't the two that were drafted at the very top. Kittle was in the top three tight end by ADP. Some R-squared analysis really paints this picture. R-squared is the coefficient of determination in mathematics. It's the proportion of the variation in the dependent variable that is predictable from the independent variable or variables. Basically, an R-squared of 1 or 100% means there's perfect correlation and that one variable explains the other variable perfectly. At or 0%, the opposite is happening. I like doing average draft position analysis through the lens of R-squared. I look at positional ADP, and then I look at PPR points per game by players in a given season. I then find the R-squared between those two variables. That essentially tells us how much average draft position helped explain a player's actual result. Let's think about why this is so important. Imagine a world where top 5 running max were consistently giving you a massive edge over your competition. Like year in and year out. You knew that having a top 5 running mac was a big, big deal, which it is. That may make you want to draft running max early in your fantasy drafts, right? However, what if the R-squared between running back average draft position and running back actual result was next to nothing? Meaning, where you drafted your running mac, it wasn't really explaining how well that running back would end up performing. Then you probably wouldn't care to draft one early, because you could just get one later who would finish with just as good of odds to be the RB1, to be a top 5 guy. Back when late-round quarterbacking was the most obvious fantasy strategy on the planet, if you go back to 2015, there was no correlation between a top 18 quarterback and how many points per game he actually scored. Top 9 quarterbacks that year were no better than the next 9 quarterbacks by ADP. In that case, if you drafted a quarterback early, you were drafting a terrible fantasy value. So think about that with tight ends. If you look at top 12 tight ends by average draft position, let's say, and there's really strong correlation between a tight end being selected in the top 12 and how many fantasy points per game that tight end actually scored, then that's better for early round tight end drafters. Because it's telling them and showing them that the earlier the pick, generally speaking, the higher the points per game output. And through the years, you get variation with this kind of thing. Some years, like in 2017, you'll get great correlation among top 12 tight ends. That year saw an R squared of.73 when looking at top 12 tight ends and where they were drafted versus how many fantasy points they actually scored. And then sometimes, you get the 2024 season. Last year, we had absolutely zero correlation, an R squared value of literally zero between top 12 tight ends, where they were drafted, and how many PPR points per game they actually scored. They were totally unpredictable thanks to Brock Bauer's performance on one end and then some busts on the other end. So that helps explain what I was talking about when I said last year's results weren't the best for tight end drafters. You could have just thrown a dart at a top 12 tight end and had just as good of a shot at a tight end one season as someone drafting the actual tight end one by ADP. That's essentially what that's saying. Now heading into 2025, things have normalized a bit. We've got a more clear-cut tight end picture. It looks like a tight end landscape that we're generally used to seeing, with a few obvious guys at the top. What I want to look at and discuss is doing the same R-squared exercise, but for tight ends outside the obvious elite tier. The elite tier where we've had Gronkowski and Kelsey and Andrews and a lot of Kittle in the past. In the draft guide, I labeled this area as tight ends drafted after tight end 6 and through tight end 18 These were the non-elite tight ends who were selected in most fantasy drafts.