Tight End By Committee - TEBC

  Posted 8/8 by Jeff Pasquino, Exclusive to Footballguys.com

Over the past few years, there have been two very popular articles written by our very own Chase Stuart that look at an interesting approach to building a fantasy team with late value picks. Based upon the theory of using both Strength of Schedule ("SOS") and taking two players as a combination to build one very good player, he has discussed both Team Defense by Committee ("TDBC") and Quarterback by Committee ("QBBC") as a general fantasy league strategy. In general I think that this is a wise move because very early on in fantasy drafts there are a ton of RB and WR prospects to go after to build a great team. While there are a few studs at QB and also a few choice defenses, I do not see a huge need in leagues to pursue either too hard in the beginning stages of a fantasy draft.

So with this in mind, I started to think about what else can be done with the committee approach. Wide receiver? Perhaps, but not a WR1. Running back? Maybe. Tight end? Hmmm, that's really intriguing. What if you could grab tight ends later in the draft that could combine to perform on a TE1 level, based solely on their current projections and their schedule? Now we're talking. This really got my attention, so I went after this. Let's take a look at how I went about building this committee and then we can digest and discuss the results.

(Tight) End Game

So how to begin? Defenses and quarterbacks are relatively easy to "committee" together. There's usually only one QB and certainly only one team defense per NFL club, so the approach is pretty simple as far as picking out which players / teams to try and pair up. When it comes to tight ends, the line is not quite so easy to draw, but I needed some basis to pick which players it made sense to try and combine for a decent committee. I decided that I would use the following criteria to decide which players to start with for evaluating:

Criteria #1 - TE13 and Beyond

This seems pretty simple. If we want to have a duo that puts up TE1 numbers, that means we want TE12 or better production - else we would just draft TE12 or higher and forget the whole idea. So here is the list of players with which I started, based on their Average Draft Position (ADP):

Table 1: Tight Ends TE13-TE24 Based on ADP

Great, now we have 12 guys to pair up and see how they do. That makes 66 potential committees, so there had better be a decent one (or several, we hope) out of all of those couplets. Now, before I go over the method of how to pair them up and the results, we need one more rule:

Criteria #2 - No more than one TE from Round 11 and one from Round 12.

This could get tricky here, but understand the overall goal. The point of TEBC is to "free up" the first 10 rounds of your fantasy draft to pursue all of the other positions for your team. Grabbing 3-4 running backs and 4-5 receivers (especially in PPR leagues) after grabbing a stud RB in Round 1 sounds like a good idea to me. This also gives you the flexibility of grabbing a stud QB, depending on your personal preference, or even to get TE1 if there's a huge value play available and have the "TEBC" be your TE2 (although I would only recommend this in very deep leagues with 20+ roster spots). Flexibility is the name of the game here. We all want value in our drafts, and having the ability to grab lots of RBs and WRs in the first 10 Rounds gives us that ability.

Here is the good news - all of the tight ends on the list above have ADPs that are Round 11 or higher (later). In fact, only the first two (Alge Crumpler and Ben Watson) are being selected on average in Round 11. We will have to keep that in mind when we look at the result because if we decide to wait unit Round 11 to get our second tight end to make up our TEBC we may be pushing it a little too far and may not get the combination that we want.

So what do we do now to figure out some TE pairs?

Criteria #3 - Use Footballguys' WR Strength of Schedule

This sounds pretty simple, doesn't it? Just take the TE Strength of Schedule to figure out when certain players are more likely to score well. What I did is similar to what the Projections Dominator and Draft Dominator do for you - take the projected fantasy points and slice them up over 17 weeks based on the strength of schedule. I call this result the "distributed fantasy points" for each receiver.

After I had all 12 tight ends with distributed fantasy points on a weekly basis, I just compared all of the possible TE pairs to find the best duos for TEBC. So here we are - time for some results.

Table 2: Tight End Committee Pairs

As we can see from Table 2, we have some very good pairs to select from for TEBC. There are 33 pairs that are worth more than Zach Miller (projected as TE13) by his lonesome, who is projected to come in with 127.8 points. Let's also take a look at how often some of these guys show up on the table:

Table 3: Tight End Committee Pair Appearances by Player

As we can see from Table 3, the top TEs on the list match up with the upper half of Table 1 (TE13-TE24), but the interesting part of these results are that a few of the top TEs are a bit lower on the ADP chart than expected. Zach Miller (TE18), L.J. Smith (TE16) and Randy McMichael (TE20) top the list with 28 total appearances, yet they are not considered to be the best picks after the Top 12 TEs are drafted. That is a significant result as it tells savvy drafters that the value comes a bit later in the draft.

Putting It All Together

Now that we have 33 possible pairs that are better than Zach Miller, what exactly does that mean? Should Zach Miller be the basis of our comparison? Of course not. Remember our goal - find a pair of tight ends that can combine for TE1-type fantasy production. To figure that out we need a better metric, so here are the projections for the Top 12 TEs, using PPR:

Table 4: Projected Fantasy Points for WRs 13-36+ (PPR)

Based on Table 4, we see that TEs beyond the Top 6 are really jumbled all over the place thanks to a good number of people sleeping on Owen Daniels. Aside from him, something else catches my eye on this chart. Jeremy Shockey (ADP of TE7, points rank of TE8) and Todd Heap (ADP of TE8, points rank of TE9) both project to 152 and 146 points, respectively. Looking at our possible pairs, we have two duos that beat 148 fantasy points, which would rank right next to Heap and Shockey for production. This tells us that choosing the correct pair can give us the result we wanted - TE1 production on the cheap.

So what about standard (non-PPR) leagues? Good question. Even though I believe that more and more leagues are using PPR, it is worthwhile to check on the validity of TEBC for non-PPR leagues. Checking the numbers quickly, I found that (A) the project fantasy points were extremely bunched together, and (B) after the Top 6 TEs were selected it was too close to call. Owen Daniels (TE7, projected 97.9 points) was barely a touchdown better than Todd Heap (TE11, 89.3 points) - so developing a committee approach in non-PPR leagues was much more of a crapshoot. For thoroughness I will include here the results for the Top 10 pairs of TEBC duos for standard (non-PPR leagues):

Table 5: Tight End Committee Pairs (non-PPR)

Considering all of the results, the committee recipe looks very clear - get Zach Miller. Nabbing him in Round 11 or Round 12 and pairing him with L.J. Smith (average ADP of 153, Round 15) or Ben Watson (ADP of 130, Round 11) would be the ideal pair in either standard or PPR formats. Based on the relative cost and value, I am recommending Zach Miller and L.J. Smith as the TEBC for 2008. Take Zach Miller in Round 11 and follow up with L.J. Smith in Round 13 (just to be safe) to pair together for your TE committee.

For thoroughness Table 2 should be your guide on Fantasy Draft Day if you attempt to use TEBC.

Here is a final summary of the combined schedules for Zach Miller and L.J. Smith, and when the committee approach suggests starting each one:

As always, feedback is welcome at pasquino@footballguys.com.