Unless it’s the superstars at the position, such as Kansas City’s Travle Kelce, tight end is a difficult roster spot to evaluate for fantasy team managers. Sometimes, it takes a few games to get a feel for how the position is going to evolve in a certain team’s offensive scheme and whether a particular player will be featured prominently.
Year after year, we see fantasy leagues taken down because of a stellar late-round draft pick or an insightful mid-season pickup that helps propel the fantasy team to the championship. As the NFL completes its Week 13 and the fantasy football season moves toward the playoffs for most leagues, BetTexas.com did some analysis for tight ends who can be that surprise difference-maker.
BetTexas.com - your home for the latest Texas sports betting news and updates - utilized FantasyData.com to examine the current fantasy rankings of those often-overlooked tight ends in a standard point-per-reception (PPR) league. BetTexas then compared the current performances of tight ends with their average draft position (ADP) rankings before the season.
Only tight ends who were in the top 40 the in original ADP rankings were included in the comparison.
Top 2023 Fantasy Football League Winners: Tight End
Ferguson Is a Star For The Cowboys
The difference between where a player was drafted, on average, and where he stands in terms of performance yields a “rank difference”. Fantasy managers who took a chance on Dallas tight end, Jake Ferguson have been rewarded.
Ferguson was drafted on average as the 25th tight end overall, and had a so-so start to the 2023 season with 10 catches on 18 targets for 60 yards and one TD through the first three games. However, in the last nine games, he’s caught 36 balls for 438 yards and four more TDs. That output has him posting 10.5 fantasy points a game, and that ranks him 8th among all tight ends, giving him a rank difference of plus-17 spots from his draft position. Not the mention the positive impact his production has had on the Cowboys Super Bowl odds.
The top tight ends for rank difference are Arizona’s Trey McBridge and Washington’s Logan Thomas, each with a rank difference of plus-25 spots. The others in the top five are No. 3, Tampa Bay’s Cade Otton, at plus-19, and just a notch below the Cowboys’ Ferguson is Detroit’s Sam LaPorta at plus-15 spots. However, Laporta’s fantasy points per game average (14.3) was higher than all the tight ends who ranked ahead of him in rank difference.
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