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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 tight ends or running backs or any other position? Looking back at the 2018 season, the first option was to use the #12 TE for the year (Jimmy Graham, 130.6 fantasy points) and take that fantasy total and divide it by 16 for a per game average. The next step, however, was to take all of the Top 36 tight ends from 2018 and sort them on a per game average. This method can account for missed games or a per-start performance metric, which is how most fantasy team owners would decide their roster for the week. The TE12 on a per-game average basis last season was Jordan Reed, with 121.8 points in 13 games, or a 9.37 points per game average - significantly different from Graham’s 8.16 average over 16 contests. Now it is reasonable to also acknowledge that taking TE12 seems a bit arbitrary, but if you are looking for a bare minimum of quality, the 12^th TE should be the "worst starter" in your fantasy league as a TE1 and a great TE2.

Next, 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: 2018 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: 2018 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 are more Excellent Starts (134) than Quality Starts (113), which is consistent with the last 6-7 seasons. Over the past 10 campaigns, the Excellent Start threshold has been between 11.3 and 13.1 points, with the past four seasons all coming in under 12 fantasy points. The total of Excellent and Quality Starts saw a dip last year with that total coming in at only 250 performances, well below the prior three seasons (287, 294 and 282 from 2015-2017). Four different tight ends had double digit Excellent Starts, while 12 had five or more. As for Bad Starts, there were plenty of those again this year with 214, 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. Table 3 summarizes a few of these trends:

Table 3: Excellent and Quality Starts - 2009 to 2018 - PPR Scoring

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 4: 2018 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 6 tight ends blew the competition away, as they accounted for over 96% of all of the positive net value tight ends in the league (a combined +44 Net Value). Travis Kelce and George Kittle both had +10 across a full 16 game season, locking them in atop this list. Zach Ertz (+8) and Eric Ebron (+7) were just behind, with O.J. Howard (+5) and Evan Engram rounding out the group. Howard is of important note, as his strong performance came in just nine contests.

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 2019 ADP list.

Table 5: 2019 Top Drafted TEs Sorted By 2018 Value - PPR Scoring

Note that five other players (rookies T.J. Hockenson and Noah Fant, Hunter Henry, Delanie Walker and Tyler Eifert) are not on the list either due to their first pro season upcoming or due to injuries.

Lots of information can be gathered from our final table. First, 2018 numbers are once again a reasonably good predictive measure of ADP this year. Kelce, Ertz, Kittle, Ebron, Howard and Engram are all at or near the top of most tight end draft lists. Jared Cook is not far off the pace as he moves from Oakland to New Orleans. The value area appears to be in the middle rounds of most fantasy drafts (ADP 108-164). Here Austin Hooper, Trey Burton, Jordan Reed and Jack Doyle can all be acquired on the cheap and represent a solid committee approach or a palatable starter option. Doyle looks to be the best value of all as Andrew Luck loves to use two tight ends, so there should be plenty of room for both Doyle and Eric Ebron to product for Indianapolis. Similar to last season, there is once again strong evidence to believe that several tight ends in the TE13-24+ ADP range this year will push for TE1 fantasy value - so 2018 numbers have to be taken with a massive grain of salt. That brings up an important point, which is that the numbers in this analysis article are based solely on last year's results. There is no reason to believe in these numbers as indications of 2019 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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