Quality Starts: Tight Ends (PPR Scoring)

Photo: Matthew Emmons, USA Today Sports

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 2014 season, I decided to take the #12 TE for the year (Larry Donnell, 161.3 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: 2014 TE Quality Start and Fantasy Point Ranges - PPR Scoring

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

Table 2: 2014 TE Start Types Sorted By Top 36 TEs - PPR Scoring

That's a lot of info to digest, so let me help. First, we see that there significantly more Excellent Starts (131) than Quality Starts (112), which is consistent with the recent trend (2013 was 171 and 124, respectively) and a much bigger difference than in the past.  The numbers in 2012 were closer with about as many Excellent Starts (165) as Quality Starts (156), and the numbers are similar to two other recent seasons (2010, 146 and 128; 2009, 143 and 119).  In 2011, the numbers were closer and actually a little inverted (more Quality Starts at 147 than the 137 Excellent starts), so this tells me that there are more and more elite tight ends pushing the top of the chart higher.  Jimmy Graham and Rob Gronkowski alone had a combined +17 just for these two studs.  As for Bad Starts, there were plenty of those again this year with 245, 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. 

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:

STARTING FANTASY 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: 2014 TE Start Types Sorted By Value - PPR Scoring

This is a lot of information once again, but some names leap out at us. For example, the Top 7 tight ends blew the competition away, as they accounted for all of the positive net value tight ends in the league (a combined +35 Net Value).  Dwayne Allen had a +5 in just 10 games, while his teammate, Coby Fleener, just missed the Top 9 positions with a -1 value.  Antonio Gates has to be looked upon with a "glass half empty" view considering his pending suspension to start the season, which opens up the door for the younger Ladarius Green. 

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 2014 ADP list.

Table 4: 2015 Top Drafted TEs Sorted By 2014 Value - PPR Scoring

Note that Kyle Rudolph (ADP of TE 17) and Tyler Eifert (ADP of TE 16) do not appear on the earlier tables due to their injuries last season, nor do two younger tight ends with potential to be in the Top 24 this year, Ladarius Green (ADP of TE 21) and Austin Sefarian-Jenkins (ADP of TE 18). 

Judging from last year, it would appear that Dwayne Allen is the best value amongst the Top 13 TEs going off the draft board, and he appears to be ready to push Coby Fleener for playing time and targets in Indianapolis once again this year.  Fleener cannot be discounted either, as Andrew Luck loves to use tight ends in the passing game.  Larry Donnell also looks to be a strong value for this coming season.  On the flip side, both Zach Ertz and Jordan Cameron seem to be overdrafted by those who want to hope that they are going to step up their production in 2015.  Ertz has high expectations as the likely top tight end in Philadelphia in his third year, while Cameron is supposed to help the Miami offense to break out and compete in the AFC East.  That brings up an important point, which is that these numbers are based solely on last year's results. There is no reason to believe in these numbers as indications of 2014 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.

Questions, suggestions and comments are always welcome to pasquino@footballguys.com.

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