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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 2019 season, the first option was to use the #12 TE for the year (Jason Witten, 71.9 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 2019 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 Dallas Goedert, with 91.1 fantasy points, or a 6.07 per-game average - significantly different from Witten's 4.87 average over 16 contests. This change brings two tight ends that were injured last year for a portion of the season - Evan Engram and Will Dissly - who both had strong per-game averages (and thus were very solid fantasy starters when available), but did not crack the Top 12 in season-long totals. 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 12th 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: 2019 TE Quality Start and Fantasy Point Ranges - Non-PPR Scoring

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

Table 2: 2019 TE Start Types Sorted By Top 36 TEs - Non-PPR Scoring

That's a lot of info to digest, so let me help. First, we see that there are way more Excellent Starts (154) than Quality Starts (74), which is consistent with the last 7-8 seasons. That seems to make sense as a touchdown reception almost immediately pushes a tight end's production into the elite category for the week with at least 6.1 points. A tight end landing in the small Quality Start window (4.6 to 7.5 points) is not easy, so it makes sense that more Excellent Starts would occur than Quality Starts by a good margin. Over the past 11 campaigns, the Excellent Start threshold has been between 6.9 and 7.9 points, but 2019 was a little different as the 7.6 threshold was the highest since 2012's 7.7 number. The total of Excellent and Quality Starts for 2019 (228 total) was even lower than 2018 (230) and well below the prior three seasons (273, 266, and 248 from 2015-2017). Five different tight ends had at least seven Excellent Starts, while nine had six or more. As for Bad Starts, there were plenty of those again this year with 207, 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 2019 - 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: 2019 TE Start Types Sorted By Value - Non-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 75% of all of the positive net value tight ends in the league (a combined +35 Net Value). Travis Kelce (+10) and George Kittle (+8) led the way with a combined +18 Net Value, locking these two Pro Bowl tight ends atop of this list. After the upper tier, two interesting names appear with Will Dissly (+3 in five games) and Kaden Smith (+1 in seven contests) sneaking up to the upper echelon of tight ends according to this metric. Dissly and Smith both took advantage of their chances to start, but both could face challengers this season. Evan Engram returns from his injury, which should push Smith down the depth chart, while Dissly will have to contend with veteran Greg Olsen, who joins Seattle after a long and illustrious career in Carolina.

Lastly, we 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 22+ tight ends on the 2020 ADP list.

Table 5: 2020 Top Drafted TEs Sorted By 2019 Value - Non-PPR Scoring

Lots of information can be gathered from our final table. First, 2019 numbers are once again a reasonably good predictive measure of ADP this year. Kelce and Kittle are joined by Darren Waller, Zach Ertz, Mark Andrews, and Hunter Henry at or near the top of most tight end draft lists. Austin Hooper had a great run in Atlanta, but now he is in Cleveland and his higher ADP reflects the uncertainty for his fantasy numbers to translate with the Browns. Jared Cook and Evan Engram both look like strong values after the top names are selected this year, while Dallas Goedert looks like a strong TE2 value play with plenty of upside for the Eagles. Two additional names worth mentioning are Rob Gronkowski and Hayden Hurst. Both players join new teams, and for Gronkowski, this is a return to action after taking a season off for a semi-retirement. Gronkowski is expected to re-connect with fellow former Patriot Tom Brady as they both are now is sunny Tampa Bay. Hurst was traded to the Falcons to fill the void of the departed Hooper. Hurst has the pedigree to become a top-notch tight end, but he could never stay healthy enough while in Baltimore to ascend to the top of the depth chart. Should Hurst excel for the Falcons, he would join Darren Waller as another former Raven draft pick that needed a new home to achieve his true potential.

Finally, and similar to several of the last seasons, 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 2019 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 2020 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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