5 Tight End SOS Beneficiaries & 3 Ideal Late-Round Pairings

Jul 20, 2021

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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 possibly more advantageous than 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, Darren Waller or George Kittle 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.

Useful Tools and Rankings: TE Rankings | aFPA | Hot Spot Tool | TE Multi-Site ADP

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 pretty barren 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 what seemed like hot refuse, 4for4’s optimal streamer scored 210.5 half-PPR points which landed as TE3 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.

4for4's TEs 13-24
2020 Rank	Player	2020 .5-PPR Points/G	Games
13	Evan Engram	6.8	16
14	Irv Smith Jr.	6.4	13
15	Adam Trautman	2.0	15
16	Jared Cook	7.3	15
17	Hunter Henry	8.2	14
18	Jonnu Smith	8.0	15
19	Anthony Firkser	4.0	16
20	Rob Gronkowski	7.9	16
21	Blake Jarwin	1.7	1
22	Gerald Everett	4.5	16
23	Cole Kmet	3.0	16
24	O.J. Howard	8.0	4

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 color-coded hot spot tool, we can easily see how defenses played against the TE position in 2020 according to 4for4’s signature metric, schedule-adjusted fantasy points allowed, or aFPA.