6 Tight End SOS Beneficiaries & Ideal Late-Round Pairings

Jul 08, 2020

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When it comes to using strength of schedule, knowing which tight ends have the most favorable path in front of them is more advantageous than perhaps any other position in a fantasy draft. This is in part due to the amount of disparity between the top few elite tight ends and the rest of the pack. In other words, if you don’t draft Travis Kelce, George Kittle or Mark Andrews and the next tier of players falter, there’s a chance you will find yourself combing the waiver wire or streaming the position at some point throughout the course of the season.

By looking ahead and evaluating each team’s schedule, you can up your chances of drafting a mid-to-low-tier player who could hit it big, therefore potentially eliminating the need for the waiver wire or streaming. No matter which strategy you choose to implement this season, walking into your draft knowing which tight ends will benefit from the softest schedules gives you a leg up on your competition. (and who doesn’t want that?)

Last season was a humid landfill for tight end streaming, or at least it felt that way from week to week. Our goal is to seek out starters, and despite the weekly search through the refuse, 4for4’s optimal streamer scored 203.6 half-PPR points which landed as TE2 through Week 17.

Streaming works, folks, so let’s take a look at this year’s crop of tight ends who fall just outside the top 12 according to 4for4’s rankings.

TEs 13-24 by 4for4 Rankings
2020 Rank	Player	2019 .5 PPR Pts/G	Games
13	Dallas Goedert	7.7	15
14	Blake Jarwin	4.4	16
15	Mike Gesicki	6.9	16
16	Jonnu Smith	5.5	16
17	Jack Doyle	5.6	16
18	Ian Thomas	1.7	16
19	Eric Ebron	6.5	11
20	Noah Fant	5.7	16
21	T.J. Hockenson	5.4	12
22	Greg Olsen	7.0	14
23	Chris Herndon	1.2	1
24	Jace Sternberger	0.0	6

Past performances aren’t always the most predictive, but they can give us a sense of a player’s potential for the upcoming season. Using our hot spot tool, we can easily see how defenses played against the tight end position last season according to 4for4’s signature metric, schedule-adjusted fantasy points allowed, or aFPA.