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.
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.
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.
