Tight End By Committee

Photo: Thomas J. Russo, USA Today Sports

Over the past several seasons, there have been quite a few very popular articles that look at an interesting approach to building a fantasy team with late value picks. Based on the theory of using both Strength of Schedule ("SOS") and taking two players as a combination to build one very good starting duo, a Tight End by Committee ("TEBC") can be built as a standard fantasy league strategy. In general, this is usually a wise move because very early on in fantasy drafts there are a ton of running back and wide receiver prospects to go after to build a great team. While there are a few studs at tight end, there is rarely a need to pursue an elite option very hard in the beginning stages of a fantasy draft.

So with this in mind, this article will apply the normal method applied to the other positions (running back and wide receiver) for the tight end position. Let's take a look at how to go about building this committee and then we can digest and discuss the results.

(TIGHT) END GAME

So how to begin? Defenses and quarterbacks are relatively easy to committee together. There's usually only one quarterback and certainly only one team defense per NFL club, so the approach is pretty simple as far as picking out which players/teams to try and pair up. When it comes to tight ends, the line is not quite so easy to draw, but I needed some basis to pick which players it made sense to try and combine for a decent committee. I decided that I would use the following criteria to decide which players to start with for evaluating:

CRITERIA #1 - TE12 AND BEYOND

This seems pretty simple. If we want to have a duo that puts up TE1 numbers, that means we want TE12 or better production - else we would just draft TE12 or higher and forget the whole idea. So here is the list of players with which I started, based on their average draft position (ADP):

Tight Ends TE12-TE30 Based on ADP

To be thorough, the list goes all the way to TE30 because of how murky the waters (and depth charts) get after the lower end of the TE2 range (TE20+). Taking the Top 30 tight ends from the ADP list and removing the Top 11 leaves 19 guys to pair up and see how they do. That makes 171 potential committees, so there had better be a decent one (or several, we hope) out of all of those couplets. Now, before I go over the method of how to pair them up and the results, we need one more rule:

CRITERIA #2 - NO MORE THAN ONE TE FROM ROUND 10 AND ONE FROM ROUND 12