Value-based drafting for Tight Ends in Standard and PPR in the 2018 Fantasy Football Season

According to our machine learning models and the Fantasy Outliers team, these Tight Ends could return higher value than ADP and ECR in the 2018 Fantasy Football season.

Chris Seal
Sep 3, 2018 · 5 min read

Last year, we Zach Ertz was our #2 Tight End going into the season and he finished #3 in PPR scoring (he was 7th in Expert Consensus Rankings). That pick helped a lot of people win their leagues. We’re all about the late-round value finds. We also were relatively high on Jimmy Graham and Jason Witten who both had good years last year. We whiffed on Jordan Reed and Tyler Eifert, due to injuries.

Tight Ends are often injury prone and touchdown dependent. Two phrases us fantasy football nerds don’t like to hear. But the value at Tight End drops of pretty fast, so if you find a good one, he can help your team go far into the playoffs.


Every year, we make predictions for: Points per Opportunity, Opportunities per Game, and Games Played. From these, other metrics like the ones we’ll discuss below can be derived. Our dataset includes data from a wide range of sources, but it does not have all the data. That’s why we think combining our models’ outputs with human opinions will lead to better results than either by itself. Hence, a few (not many) of the projections below have been hand adjusted.

We will show you:

  • Weekly Value: This compares individual Points per Game projections to the average Pts/Gm projection of the top 20 projected players at a given position. It can be interpreted as average points won/lost versus position (against the top 20 players).
  • Total Points: This is simply our Points Per Game projection multiplied by our Games Played projection. Last year, we predicted 27% of the variance in games played (not bad), and our total points projection beat ESPN’s pretty handily.

So without further ado, let’s get to it…


This Average Weekly Value chart shows how many points our models think a player is going to win/lose your team against the top 20 starters at tight end. If you’re in a 12-team/1TE league, the numbers will be a little lower, but the relative rankings should be similar.

Projected Weekly Points Won/Lost vs. Top 20 at Position — PPR (left) and Standard (right)
  • In PPR (left) 4 of the top 5 picks align with Expert Consensus Rankings.
  • Vance McDonald (Pit) at slightly below replacement could be a good backup or waiver wire pickup.
  • Our models are not feeling Greg Olsen this year (though, I could see him rebounding, personally) and are not on the Jimmy Graham/Aaron Rodgers train (though, also, I could see that happening). Very conclusive advice, eh?
  • It’s worth noting that our models were very high on O.J. Howard this year, until we adjusted him down (since our projections for second year players aren’t as good as the vets).

These projections are Points/Game * Games Played, so they take into account injury risk.

Projected Total Points Scored (Points per Game * Games Played) — PPR (left) and Standard (right)
  • These Total Points projections seem pretty similar to the weekly value ones, so I’m going to skip the analysis here.

Top 20 ECR rankings on the y-axis and corresponding Fantasy Outliers Weekly Value rankings on the x-axis. Anyone in the top left of the graph is a potential value find. Green means they have a projected positive value versus top 20 players at their position. Rankings are for PPR scoring.

Fantasy Outliers’ Weekly Value Projection vs. Expert Consensus Rankings (ECR): Top left half is where, according to our projections, you can find draft value relative to ECR
  • Delanie Walker could be a good value find at the top end of the tight end position. That guy doesn’t age!
  • Eric Ebron could be a replacement level guy later on in your draft (ECR #13 vs. FO #6).
  • George Kittle isn’t on this graph, because our models are so low on him. Granted, our models for second year players aren’t as good, but ECR has him at #12.

These are screenshots from our interactive tool, built by Ray Harris.

Fantasy Outliers’ Tight End rankings

For the full experience, our 2018 Fantasy Football Season Projections are now available for free in this Glorious Google Sheet.

To stay in touch, please, join us by following us on Twitter (@fantasyoutliers) or subscribing to our weekly newsletter. We’re a small team, so let’s grow together!


Fantasy Outliers

Where machines and humans team up to win at fantasy sports

Chris Seal

Written by

Co-Founder, Lead Data Scientist at Fantasy Outliers

Fantasy Outliers

Where machines and humans team up to win at fantasy sports

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