Best-ball strategies for Tight Ends

The need to grab your second tight end doesn’t prove to be much of a rush.

There’s no secret about tight ends. Travis Kelce has been a huge difference-maker for the last five years, and the next four or five are worth starting. But beyond that, the difference from one tight end to the next doesn’t amount to any appreciable difference in fantasy score.

But as we broke down the quarterbacks for best ball purposes, it’s a worthwhile exercise for this lowest-scoring of fantasy positions. Can we draft two earlier tight ends and hope to match what Kelce is cranking out at the top of the rankings? Does it matter when we take any backup, much less match them with an elite tight end?

In the “best ball” format, there are no starting decisions. The league software  automatically awards you with the highest-scoring quarterback on your roster for that week.

Let’s break down where the average best ball draft takes tight ends.

Average draft position for best ball tight ends

First off, this is when the Top-24 tight ends are drafted in the average best ball draft this summer. It’s similar to traditional leagues.

Round TE order
1 1
2
3 2
4 3
5
6 4 5 6
7 7
8 8
9 9 10
10 11
11 12 13
12 14 15
13 16 17 18
14 19 20
15 21
16 22 23 24

No surprises. Travis Kelce is an unquestioned first-round pick. Mark Andrews ends up in the third round and T.J. Hockenson is usually gone sometime in the fourth round. In the sixth round, team owners decide to get a Top-6 tight end and draft from the pool of George Kittle, Kyle Pitts, and Dallas Goedert. Occasionally, Kittle goes earlier but Pitts and Goedert remain round six scratch-off tickets.

After that, the trickle continues with far less agreement about which tight end belongs where.

Once the sixth tight end is taken, the remaining options are roughly equal in upside and risk. A few will step up as the annual surprises, a few will be injured or otherwise disappoint, and the rest end up as “just another tight end.”

Mixing and matching tight ends

Since every week matters, I gave each tight end their average fantasy game score from 2022 to replace any missing games. That changed the order a bit from what actually happened, but nothing dramatic.

Here are the Top-24 once their missed games were replaced.

Using the weekly scores from those players, we’ll just call them by their rank to represent that draft order.

First, let’s look at the extremes:

TE No. 1 (308.5) and TE No. 2 (214.8) = 358 best ball points
TE No. 23 (93.7) and TE No. 24 (89.6) = 139.2 best ball points

The reality is that Kelce skews everything. The No. 2 and the No. 3 combined for 299.9 best ball points. When charted, the slope of the line for descending total scores is very steep. Let’s see how combining different tight ends produces varying fantasy points.

Mixing your TE1 and his backup – how many best ball points?

Below shows the “best ball” points for each combination of your first-drafted tight end (in blue) and all the possible second tight ends you could have drafted last year. This assumes no bad picks and the black cells are when the two tight ends had the same bye week.

A second tight end is rarely taken before the first ten are off the board by Round 10. There’s no reason to bulk up your lowest-scoring position at the expense of all the higher-scoring positions. So the below table considers that the backup tight ends are considered starting in Round 10 with the No. 11 tight end drafted.

I’ll also assume that every team has a tight end by Round 12. Anything deeper and you’ve just entirely ignored a scoring position.

The position always skews heavily towards the Top-3 and, in best ball, they remain a big advantage.

TE1 was: TE  11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24
1 323 319 322 323 326 337 317 317 311 320 317 312 330
2 255 262 259 269 251 245 254 241 244 240 239 239 252
3 246 237 254 261 246 243 241 242 236 229 244 232 223
4 263 259 252 248 249 247 235 236 220 236 222
5 229 237 236 215 222 226 203 205 208 221 206 213 223
6 219 234 218 232 226 209 209 200 206 209 195 211 164 199
7 235 226 226 222 222 204 205 213 190 192 205 192 203
8 225 247 219 229 233 223 224 213 219 207 216 216 208 208
9 223 220 229 212 207 216 200 198 186 201 200 199 207
10 226 214 225 223 217 207 195 201 181 193 184 188 195
11 215 201 216 214 186 202 196 196 189 189 190 194 185
12 201 201 220 196 190 178 186 190 194

This is interesting and very telling about the realities of best ball scoring. In traditional league scoring, you can drive yourself crazy trying to pick the right middle-tier tight end every week. In best ball, you always have the optimal lineup.

But – the impact is surprising. The numbers will vary up and down when pairing two tight ends together because they are two unique sets of 17 games matching up. The need to grab your second tight end doesn’t appear to be much of a rush. Travis Kelce was so dominating last year, that you only lost seven best-ball points between using the No. 11 and No. 24 ranked tight ends as his backup. You only lost three points with the No. 2 going with the No. 24 instead of the No. 11.

What the pairing in best ball does well is to make those No. 5 through No. 10 tight ends all end up pretty similar, not unlike they already do when weighed individually.

Other than Kelce in the first round, taking a top tight end does make a difference, but not nearly as pronounced as it might seem. Pairing a Top-5 tight end with a second tight end in Round 12 offers some advantage though only twenty to forty points.

But if I own three?

We saw the impact of this on the quarterbacks. You only have one score from a tight end, and the deeper that third tight end is taken, the less likely they can offer more points in a given week than the first two.

No. 5 and No. 12 produce 237 best-ball points. Add in the No. 15 in the next round and it only results in nine more points (246).

The No. 10 and No. 12 total 226 points. Add in the No. 20 and the total shoots up to 233 or just seven more points.

You can get more points from three than just two tight ends, and it makes at least a bit of sense if you waited on that first tight end. But the point boost isn’t much. On the other hand, at least you are in a better shape to get a sleeper tight end.

 Bottom Line

If you draft a Top-5 tight end, then wait for the end of the draft before you bother with someone who is just going to cover a bye week. There’s no real reason to take any of the early backups. Granted, what if your elite tight end is injured? Well, that is a difference that you cannot make up in any case.

You will be at a disadvantage if you start later than those Top-5, but grabbing a second (and even a third) tight end sooner than later can help soften the difference. Tight ends are the lowest-scoring skill position, and if you wait until the sixth round or later, the best you can hope for is that the position isn’t a gaping weekly hole in your scoring. Getting three may not add much, but it could help keep the position from being a problem.