When to Draft a Tight End in Your Fantasy League

Aug 08, 2020

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Tight end was a hot, steamy, drainpipe in 2019, unless, of course, you drafted one of the top three (Travis Kelce, George Kittle and Zach Ertz), or were astute enough to grab Mark Andrews or Darren Waller. There were others who were serviceable most weeks, but if you decided to punt the position or stream from week to week, it was pretty gross.

The good news is that the position is coming out from its dark, swampy existence with a new crew of young players ready to make an impact in both the real and fake football world.

More Positional Strategy Guides: QB | WR | RB

This piece takes a look at how to approach the tight end this season according to draft position, assuming a 12-team snake draft with both positional and overall ADP courtesy of the 4for4 Multi-Site ADP tool.

Note: Projected rankings and ADP are for half-PPR scoring.

Front-Half of Draft Tight End Strategy

Round 1

Unless you are in a tight-end-premium or crazy-scoring-for-quarterback-superflex format, your early spot should go to a running back this season. Christian McCaffrey, Ezekiel Elliott and Saquon Barkley are the chalk here, as they should be. They will most likely be followed by Michael Thomas and a few other backs.

If you’re feeling like you really want to take a tight end, and sometimes that emotion can overtake some folks, then Travis Kelce would be the way to go, as he led all tight ends in targets last year with a clear path to the same usage again in 2020. Some may argue for Kittle as the TE1 and I love him too, but if you’re going to stick your neck out this early in the draft, it would have to be for Kelce.

Looking at opportunity cost at the top of the draft, the three running backs mentioned above and Thomas are projected to post 307, 257, 244 and 243 half-PPR points, respectively, while Kelce’s projection is 223.