Quality Tight Ends

  Posted 8/6 by Jeff Pasquino, Exclusive for Footballguys.com

There are some fantasy football players that believe that the lineup you pick can lose you a game just as much as it can win a contest. Having a player give you a consistent performance week after week can be considered more valuable than a player who goes off every third week and then takes two weeks off between those fantastic performances. Consistency has a value, and it does not take much of a leap to understand that players that you can rely on for solid games when you need them (such as in your postseason) are a huge advantage.

Baseball has a term called "Quality Starts" for pitchers, which is a statistic that represents how often a starting pitcher will put up a good (not great, just good) performance in a given game. The bar is set neither high nor low (six innings pitched, three earned runs or fewer) so as to gauge a decent performance. The theory behind it is that if your pitcher gives you a Quality Start, your team has a fighting chance to win a given game.

So now we need to translate this to football. What is "quality" for each position? How do we define a "Quality Start" for quarterbacks or running backs or any other position? Looking back at the 2008 season, I decided to take the #12 TE for the year (Tony Scheffler, 81.5 fantasy points) and take that fantasy total and divide it by 16 for a per game average. Now a case can be made to argue against doing this. I did not account for missed games or a per-start performance metric, but I believe that the numbers will get averaged out by doing this method. Also, taking TE12 seems a bit arbitrary, but if you are looking for a bare minimum of quality, the 12th TE should be the "worst starter" in your fantasy league.

So now we move on to the next question - one of quantifying the quality. At what point do we decide whether or not a tight end has given us a quality performance? Here is where it gets a bit murky, but looking at the distribution of TE performances by starters over the season and it becomes evident that the using the 12th TE average and adding or subtracting a percentage gives us a good range for a TE Quality Start.

Using the TE Quality Start range, we can also define a bad performance or an excellent performance as either falling below or exceeding the Quality Start range. Table 1 gives us the fantasy points that it takes to fall in each of the three areas:

Table 1: TE Quality Start and Fantasy Point Ranges - Standard Scoring

Table 2 shows us the breakdown of all the Top 36 TEs and how many of each type of start resulted for each:

Table 2: 2008 TE Start Types By Player Sorted By Total Starts

That's a lot of info to digest, so let me help. First, we see that there are about as many Excellent Starts (161) combined with Quality Starts (88) as Bad Starts (297), so that gives me a good idea that the ranges are in line. Yes there are a large number of Bad Starts but we are only looking for the best here, plus a "start" is not as definitive for a positional player that may just see partial playing time. The net results look like a good trend, which means that our distribution is close to normal and that our baseline point range does make sense.

Now, to dig deeper, let's look at the numbers distributed in two different ways. First, I need to define a valuable starting tight end in this system. We want a TE that will win more fantasy games than lose them, so we want either "Quality" or "Excellent" starts. Using a simple formula of scoring each type of start, we can define the value of a given NFL tight end. Here is the formula:

NFL TE Value = Excellent Starts - Bad Starts

We neglect to look at Quality Starts because they neither win games nor lose them on average - they are just average TE performances. We only really care about how often he helps our team vs. how often he hurts it. Giving a "-1" value to bad starts and "+1" to excellent ones does this for us.

On with the results, sorted by value:

Table 3: 2008 TE Start Types Sorted By Value

This is a lot of information once again, but some names leap out at us. For example, John Carlson was a pleasant surprise last year, and Vishante Shiancoe came out of nowhere. On the low side, Vernon Davis has a long way to go to become relevant as a fantasy starting tight end.

Lastly I will sift through it for you and get right to the heart of the matter with our final table. Here we have the results sorted by value for the Top TEs on the 2009 ADP list.

Table 4: 2009 Top Drafted TEs Sorted By 2008 Value

Note that a few tight ends that are missing from the Top 20 ADP list for the simple reasons that they were either hurt quite a bit last year (Randy McMichael) or that they are rookies (Brandon Pettigrew). Judging form last season, it would appear that John Carlson is the best value amongst the Top 10 TEs going off the draft board, while Tony Scheffler could prove to be a huge steal if he can match last year's pace for a full season. That brings up an important point, which is that this is based solely on last year's results. There is no reason to believe in these numbers as indications of 2008 performance, but having this information available should give you more to think about when deciding who you will have leading your fantasy team this year.

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