The Dynasty Lifecycle of Tight Ends (Fantasy Football)
The struggle in dynasty fantasy football often revolves around balancing short-term needs with long-term potential.
This brings up the following questions:
- How do you navigate the delicate balance between building a championship roster and ensuring its sustainability for the years to come?
- How long should you wait for a player to break out in the NFL?
- Or, when should you trade away a proven veteran for a promising rookie, even if it means sacrificing immediate production?
In the Dynasty Lifecycle series, we attempt to answer these questions by leveraging historical data (provided by @Stathead) to understand the peaks and valleys of an NFL player. For each position, let’s focus on these key numbers to accomplish the following:
- Evaluating the Draft Capital
- Finding the Breakout
- Avoiding the Decline
- Mapping the Lifecycle
If you have any questions, reach out on Twitter @FF_MarvinE!
Evaluating the Draft Capital
As with any skill position, draft capital remains the most predictive variable of success in the league. While there will always be outliers, there is a clear trend that day-one prospects are the much safer investments for your dynasty teams.
The impact of draft capital can be evaluated in multiple ways. One simple approach is calculating the breakout (or hit) rates for each round. In this analysis, a fantasy point threshold is used to define a breakout performance. For the chart above, a threshold of 8.0 half-PPR points was used, which is based on the average TE12 performance over the last two decades. This metric is calculated by dividing the number of players who met or exceeded the threshold by the total number of players drafted in each round.
As expected, tight ends drafted in the first round have the highest hit rate at 80%, while the hit rate for second-round tight ends is only 38%. That equates to a sizable gap of 42 percentage points, the highest between the first and second rounds among ALL skill positions. Considering the significant difference in breakout rates, it truly emphasizes the value of day-one tight ends and why they should be drafted as early as the first round of dynasty rookie drafts. For context, we have only seen 10 tight ends drafted in the first round between 2010 and 2021. Despite the smaller sample size, the only ones that have NOT broken out are Hayden Hurst and Noah Fant.
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