Let Loose the Tight End, Part One: Standard Scoring Systems

Ryan Finley Posted On July 30, 2018

Scott Fish Bowl 8 is well underway. (If you follow fantasy Twitter you didn’t really need me to tell you that.) This is my second year in the league, and so far there are two things that SFB brings out in me. One, it makes me get off my butt and donate to a fantastic cause. FantasyCares has – as of this writing – raised over $30,000. We can do a lot better though, I think. Donate here.

And the other thing? It makes me think a lot more about scoring. I know it’s a subject near and dear to Scott Fish’s heart, evidenced by his use of unique and experimental scoring systems in SFB. When I have to spend a little time thinking about my strategy due to those unique scoring formats, my mind tends to start to spin on scoring myself. Last year, it had me think long and hard about quarterback scoring, but I never got anywhere useful with that. This year, I’ve had tight ends on my mind. So why tight ends? Let me ask you a few questions to set the stage a bit.

Ever hear of Zero-TE as a draft strategy? Of course not, basically everyone already uses it by default.

Ever see an owner draft three tight ends in the first four rounds? Nobody is that dumb.

Have you ever traded a top wide receiver for a top tight end? Ok, you maybe tried it once a couple of years back with Rob Gronkowski, but you felt really bad afterwards, didn’t you?

Let’s just all be honest with ourselves. Tight end scoring is flat broken. That being said, is there anything we could do to fix it?

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First, I started to wonder. Have tight ends always been marginalized in fantasy, or was there a time when they were a more premium position? I began to think about the research and data gathering necessary to really dive into that, but then I passed out. Luckily, I was saved by our own Peter Howard who had already done all the legwork in this area last year in a historical look at the tight end position and its performance. There some fantastic data and analysis in this piece, and I highly recommend checking it out.

But to answer my original question, what Peter found is that no; tight end has never really been a premium position. There have always been a few top performers at the position, and then everyone else. But it’s never been a position that scores nearly as well as any other.

So I decided to see if I could remedy that situation. Could I drum up a scoring system that would give tight ends more value overall? I came up with five variants of tight end scoring. I pulled the top 100 tight ends for each of these scoring systems in addition to the top 100 tight ends for vanilla PPR. In this first part, I’ll take a look at the scoring systems you’re most familiar with: vanilla PPR, 1.5 PPR, and 2.0 PPR. When we get to part two, we’ll get a little crazier. Let’s get to it.

Vanilla 1 Point Per Reception

I’m mostly including this to remind you just how bad standard PPR is for the tight end position. The top overall tight end last year was only the 42nd-ranked player overall. If that isn’t bad enough, only eight tight ends appear in the top 100 players. Yes, you heard that right – of the top 100 players, 92 come from QB, RB, and WR. And though it’s not listed here, the 23rd overall tight end scored less than 100 total points last season. That is abysmal. It’s no wonder tight ends are an afterthought of an afterthought in most vanilla leagues. They are egregiously undervalued. Nothing to see here, really. Let’s move on to a couple of the more standard variants meant to help the position.

“Tight End Premium” – 1.5 PPR

In this version, a whopping (/sarcasm off) 14 players crack the top 100 overall. (Just remember that means there are 86 QBs, RBs and WRs making up the remainder.) Travis Kelce made it all the way up to the 18th overall player, and you can go all the way down to TE25 before you sink under the 100 point line. I’ve got to be honest, calling this “Tight End Premium” is a little disingenuous. Maybe we need a new name like “Tight End Marginally Better.” If you’re in leagues set up like this and giving tight ends all that much more weight, you might be doing it wrong.

“Tight End Super Premium” – 2.0 PPR

With super premium scoring, we’ve finally gotten somewhere. The top tight end from last year finally sits where the top scorer from each major position should sit, in the top ten overall. We now also see 18 players in the top 100 overall, a huge improvement over standard PPR. In addition to that, there are now nine tight ends who scored over 200 points, and 19 of the 20 tight ends listed here averaged over ten points per game. Not too shabby. I think we can mark this one as a “might be useful.”

At the very least, I think we learned one thing so far: vanilla 1 point per reception scoring is killing the tight end position. There’s even an argument here that typical “Tight End Premium” of 1.5 PPR should be put out to pasture as well. It’s barely a concession to the position, to say the least. Tight End Super Premium – at 2.0 PPR – goes a long way to fixing some of the issues with the position, but does it place too much weight on that one stat, receptions? Are there more unique or exotic systems that could do more? Come back for part two and we’ll see.

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