Photo: Imagn Images

Welcome to Learning from History, where I dig into every fantasy season since 1985 to find historical comparisons for modern players.

In my mind, historical comparisons serve two purposes. In instances where we have broad intuitions about how good or bad a player is, comparisons allow us to add a bit of precision both to the proper expectation and to the range of outcomes surrounding it.

Highly-drafted running backs who have strong first seasons tend to have valuable fantasy careers ahead of them, so Josh Jacobs’ dynasty outlook is good. But the devil is in the details. How good? Clearly he’s worth a future 1st round rookie pick. Is he worth two of them? Three? What if the picks are low? What if they’re high? Placing more precise numbers to his value allows us to make more informed decisions about when to buy and when to sell.

Alternately, comparisons are often useful instances where we do not have strong intuitions in the first place. Darren Waller had 199 yards in his first four years. (Not per year, but total.) In year 5, he had 1150 yards, the 20th-highest single-season total by a tight end in history.

What are we to make of Darren Waller?

It might be difficult to think of a similar player. Or if one does come to mind, it’s likely 2015 breakout sensation Gary Barnidge, who had 603 yards through his first seven seasons before erupting for 1043 in Year 8. A comparison to Barnidge is unflattering for Waller because Barnidge had just 612 more yards over the rest of his career.

But relying on memory to find comparable players leaves us susceptible to a whole host of cognitive biases— selection bias, confirmation bias, availability heuristic, and a raft of others. Which is why it’s so useful to take an objective look through history.

I have a database of every fantasy season since 1985, and I scoured it for the most comparable players to Waller. I’ve presented all of the comparisons here in full, both so you can evaluate my criteria and the resulting lists for yourself.

These lists of historically comparable players don’t fully outline the range of possibilities in front of Darren Waller. After all, any list of comparable players to Jerry Rice would always suggest a range of outcomes that didn’t include the trajectory Jerry Rice eventually took. Each player is an individual and events that happened to unrelated players decades ago hardly represent any sort of destiny.

But while history never repeats itself, it often rhymes, and looking at the fates of yesterday's breakout stars can leave us better equipped to predict what lies in store for today's.

A Note On Methodology:

I am searching players by total fantasy value, which is an approximation of how many extra points they would have provided a fantasy GM over a waiver-wire replacement. A big advantage of this approach is it automatically adjusts for league environment; getting 1150 yards in a season where teams are passing a lot more to their tight ends might be more comparable to just 800 yards in a season where tight ends were lightly used, say.

But just because a player has positive value doesn’t mean he was very good. Remember, the point of comparison is a theoretical “waiver-wire replacement”. So here are some benchmarks to keep in mind.

Over the last decade, 120 tight ends have added 44 points over a waiver replacement, an average of 12 per year. So 44 points is the rough mark of a “TE1 season” (the closest example from last year was Dallas Goedert, with 42 points over replacement). Similarly, 60 tight ends have produced about 74 points of value over replacement, so that would rank was TE6 in a typical year (the closest match last year was Jared Cook with 71). Finally, 112 points is historically around the TE3 mark (Waller himself had 111 last year).

Comparison #1: 5th-year Breakout Tight Ends

It makes sense to keep things easy to start. Waller produced virtually nothing through four years before having a great season in year 5. What other tight ends have matched that feat? I searched for every tight end since 1985 who

• produced <25 points of value through his first four seasons combined, before
• producing >44 points of value in year 5. (44 points of value, remember, is the rough breakpoint for a "TE1 finish".)

Here's the complete list:

There are two points that need to be made about this list of comparable players.

First, this list of comps is catastrophic for Waller. Of the eight comparable players, just one returned TE1 value the next season, and only barely. Five were less productive than what you would expect to find freely available on waivers in any given week. Only one player (Metzelaars) had any reasonable career value left, and most of that came in his 11th, 12th, and 13th seasons in the league. If these players are in any way indicative of what we can expect from Darren Waller, fantasy owners who invest in him will be devastated.

Second, this list of comps is terrible. Not terrible as in unproductive, but terrible as in barely comparable to Darren Waller. Trey Burton's fifth season featured 323 more yards and 1 more touchdown than his fourth season. Jack Doyle had 106 more yards and one fewer touchdown, but tight end production just happened to drop precipitously across the league that year (the "waiver wire replacement" baseline dropped by a point and a half from the previous season).

For a perfect set of comps, you'd want the player we're investigating to fall somewhere in the middle of the range, with about the same number of players above and below him and the group average roughly comparable to the player's totals. That's not what we see here. Waller is head and shoulders above the others. Half of the list was barely startable in their "breakout year". We shouldn't necessarily expect this group's performance to be a great match for Waller's expectations.

So let's ease the restrictions a little bit.

Comparison #2: Huge Breakout Tight Ends

For this comparison, we don't care so much when the tight end broke out, as long as it was at least Year 3. So we're altering our criteria to any tight end who

• was in his 3rd season or later,
• had never topped 44 points of value (the rough "TE1" breakpoint)
• produced at least 78 points of value (the rough "Top-6 TE" breakpoint)
• and bettered his previous career best by at least 60 points (to find more "true breakout" candidates)

Because some might question how comparable a 3rd-year breakout tight end is to a 5th-year breakout tight end, I've provided two averages on this list, both with and without the "third-year breakout" tight ends. Excluding the third-year breakouts raises the average age of breakout (obviously) and slightly increases the "best prior season" (because the tight ends in question had more seasons in the league before their breakout), but doesn't meaningfully change the size of the breakout year or how the players performed in their follow-up season. (It does decrease total career value remaining, largely because the younger you break out, the more seasons you have left in front of you.)

This list is probably a much better match for your intuitions of what a "breakout tight end" should look like. Brent Celek increased his receiving totals by more than 500 yards and 7 touchdowns from the prior season. Julius Thomas had just one reception for 5 yards before his pro bowl appearance in Year 3. Kyle Brady more than doubled his previous career-best yardage total. Marcus Pollard added 300 yards and 5 touchdowns over his previous best season (at a time when tight ends didn't gain nearly as many yards).

More importantly, as a group they were roughly as productive in their breakout seasons as Waller was last year, averaging 106 points over replacement. These were all surprise high-end TE1s. Waller finds himself roughly in the middle of the pack.

This list is also a bit better for his overall prospects, but still not great. 4 out of 14 comparable starters performed as a high-end TE1 in their follow-up campaign, half of them finished as fantasy starters, and as a whole, the group averaged around a 12th-place finish.

Comparison #3: Wide Receivers

So far these comparisons are rather pessimistic and suggest we're overvaluing Waller in both redraft (where he's on average the 5th tight end off the board) and in dynasty (where he's usually 6th or 7th). I tend to believe that Waller's prospects are better than these comparisons suggest. They suggest he may live up to expectations, but it's more likely he doesn't.

The one case you could make in Waller's favor is that the tight end position has been changing. A tight end in 2019 isn't expected to do the same things as a tight end in 1989. When the Saints franchised Jimmy Graham, he argued that the team should have to pay him based on the wide receiver value, since he spent more time split out wide than tight to the formation. It's possible that the best comparisons for Waller are likewise not tight ends, but wide receivers.

Cross-position comparisons are dangerous and I hesitate to make them, but I do think they are useful here. So I've pulled a list of every wide receiver since 1985 who

• produced 44 or fewer points of value through four years and
• produced 78 or more points of value in Year 5

(Note that DeVante Parker's breakout season came in 2019. He is excluded from the group averages.)

Again, cross-positional comparisons are fraught. This set of comparisons can help inform our opinion of Waller, but it is not a substitute for the list of comparable tight ends. But if you wanted to paint a rosier picture, this list would do it. Six out of ten comparable wide receivers produced at a level that would justify Waller's current draft position in redraft. Six out of ten comparable receivers had remaining career value roughly on par with three more TE6 finishes. If you accept these comps, Waller's current market price is probably pretty fair.

But I'm not sold on the idea that Waller is truly comparable to a wide receiver. I think a blended approach is best. If you combine the wide receiver list with the second tight end list, the percentage of players who lived up to Waller's current redraft cost falls to 42%. The percentage of players who justified Waller's current dynasty price was closer to 38%.

These are not bad odds, so the current cost of acquisition for Darren Waller isn't especially egregious. But if history is any guide, his owners are more likely to wind up disappointed than not.