Fantasy Football Spike Week Tool Analysis: Draft Dallas Goedert in Best Ball
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Fantasy football drafts this year will be littered with people scratching their heads about how to approach the TE position. Some players will salivate over the clearly differentiated trio of top TEs, and others will punt the position entirely. It’s one of the more interesting strategy choices of the summer.
I’ve been looking at this as I help to put together our seasonal projections. I’ve developed my strategy for Best Ball play by thinking about the upside potential of lower ADP TEs to ascend to upper-level TE production. In this article, I will examine the benefits of _ difference-making_ TEs and determine if there really is more upside when paying the premium price. To do this, I’ll lean on the projections and our spike week tool for guidance.
Update: This article was written prior to the news that Zach Ertz may still play for Philadelphia for the 2021 season. This would impact the draft stock of Goedert and the opinions expressed below.
What is a Spike Week?
For our analysis, we define them as such:
Spike Weeks are the expected weeks with a greater than 80th percentile performance at the position. As an example: A WR has his threshold of spike set based on the past performances of WR1s (highest actual scorer for each team). On DK, that value is 22 fpts and we’re measuring how probable a player is to get there in each matchup. Expected Spike Weeks is the sum of all 18 probabilities.
Strike Weeks are the expected weeks with a greater than 66th percentile performance at the position, the same as Spike Weeks but with a lower threshold.
(Why are they called Strike Weeks you ask? Alliteration.)
Comparing Top Tight Ends to Wide Receivers
The efficiency of the tight end market at the top of the draft is what stands out to me this year. Travis Kelce performs like one of the better wide receivers from a fantasy perspective and is drafted before all of them in many drafts. His enormous spike week expectation when rated at the TE position is also fully priced into that draft slot. In fact, the price points for the top TEs are basically the same as many WR1s and top QBs. So that begs the question for me: Do these TE’s “Spike” at the same level as WRs or even close?
Timeout. Why do I care to ask this?
Generally speaking, it is GREAT to make the playoffs and give yourself a chance to win the big money. Theoretically, thinking about huge fantasy games is overrated. Simply scoring enough to consistently enter your lineup at a modest level is a fantastic, undervalued aspect of winning.
However, to win the largest prizes available you would prefer to have some volatility. It would make sense to have the highest expectation of the most violent vertical spike games during those ever so important championship rounds, and the largest violent spikes are available to the early round RBs and WRs. A strong performance can easily carry a team to a weekly 1st place finish, which is the end game in massive tournaments. It’s not the only way to win and the reality isn’t this cut and dry, but it makes sense to lean in the direction of players who we believe have that kind of potential.
Timeout Over.
Back to the question: “Do we expect top TEs to spike as often as similar priced WRs?” I looked at our data and the answer is pretty clear: No, we don’t expect even the elite TEs to have as much spike potential as comparable cost WRs. I rated the Top TEs as if they were WRs in terms of “Spike Weeks”, and the results were not outstanding.
Travis Kelce: Rated as the WR5 on DraftKings where the bonus and PPR scoring are in play. On Underdog where there is only half PPR and no bonuses, he plummets to WR 13. His draft cost is equal to the WR1 on both sites, making this a losing proposition if all you cared about was the probability of huge games.
Darren Waller: His spike potential as a WR on Underdog is nearly invisible. On DraftKings, the volume and bonuses give him enough of a boost to cross the threshold more often. He compares to WRs like Odell Beckham, Brandon Aiyuk, and Chase Claypool in terms of expected Spike Weeks.
All the other TEs don’t compare at all in spike potential to a WR. Outlier games exist for guys like George Kittle, Mark Andrews, and T.J. Hockenson but the vast majority of their expected outputs just don’t fall in line with the WR1 production you can expect at the 80th percentile.
What about the above average “Strike Weeks?” These weeks are still very helpful in fantasy football and would virtually guarantee inclusion in a best ball lineup. Do these TEs afford us that level of high-end output?
Kelce: WR3 in DK strikes. WR2 in UD strikes.
Waller: WR9 in DK strikes. WR16 in UD strikes.
Kittle: WR25 in DK strikes. WR25 in UD strikes.
Pitts: WR41 in DK strikes. WR51 in UD strikes.
Once again, we can find WRs who give us more at these players’ draft cost… but guess what? They’re not WRs. So we need to consider the advantage of having them eligible at the TE position.
Evaluating Top Tight End Rankings
The ADP does a good job of accurately pricing TEs relative to each other based on our median expected fpts and our spike week analysis. Kelce is proven, consistent, and advantageous to own. He’s rates significantly better than anyone else by any metric you want to use for evaluation. However, he also has by far the highest cost I think I’ve ever seen for a TE. That makes it more difficult to capitalize on that margin. Both Waller and Kittle are also priced fairly for the otherwise glaring edges they carry at the position.
Kyle Pitts at ADP 45 may be overpriced at this point, but it’s also fair to say we don’t know that for sure. The Falcons are totally devoid of a WR2 and the team has supported two consolidated targets in the past. Both Julio Jones and Calvin Ridley were able to capture significant production (194 total targets in 24 combined games in 2020) on this team as the top two options. Jones is gone, leaving Pitts as the most logical choice to consume much of that missing target volume. That gives him plenty of upside, but his price is insane for a rookie player on a lower-tier football team.
In summary, the price points (in my view) balance out the positional edge for these specific players.
Why Dallas Goedert is the Best Balance of Price and Upside
The two most interesting TEs in this draft are T.J. Hockenson (Underdog ADP 60) and Dallas Goedert (Underdog ADP 86). Expected Spike weeks fall off at a noteworthy level after Pitts and Andrews, but the Strike Weeks do not. Furthermore, the team situations for these players leave room for upside. This CANNOT be stated for any of the 5 TEs above them.
Philadephia and Detroit are both in transition. Both teams are expected to be bad and operating with new QBs (we’ll call Jalen Hurts new because he’s not that experienced and the offense wasn’t designed around him in the offseason like it may be this year). Philadelphia is expected to shed Zach Ertz and leave Goedert as the primary TE entering his prime.
This leaves a lot of room for fantasy projections to be too low on Goedert. Presently, we project 17.5% of targets as his baseline volume. You can’t rule out a 20% target share as a result of his new situation, even though we don’t project that to be most likely. That would put him on par with the top TEs if he did reach that level, with the best comps being Kyle Pitts or Mark Andrews. This is a level of target volume we have seen him command before! Here is how Goedert performed in weeks with and without Ertz in 2020:
Week 10 – 16.7%
Week 11 – 17.6%
Week 12 – 23.8%
Note: He had 5 other weeks of 19.5%+ targets with Ertz
You really do love to see it.
T.J. Hockenson is an even more gifted athlete on a team that is wildly unremarkable at the pass catching positions. Stonewashed nobodies Tyrell Williams and Breshad Perriman have had their good days, but calling them worrisome for any NFL defense is beyond an overstatement. The rest of the crew doesn’t even merit mention. Hockenson commanded 10 weeks of target share of 18% or above while this team still had Kenny Golladay and Marvin Jones. He is clearly capable of dominating this terrible offense without them, but the operative words here are “terrible offense.”
Looking at draft prices, there is a clear standout between the two. We already mentioned that Goedert is 26 spots cheaper, plays on a better offense, and has outs to similar volume as TEs higher up the board. The spike week potential is already there for him on some level, and a volume increase would only improve that. To me, he is the best chance at ADP arbitrage among this top TE group.
The Lower Tier of TE1
Players like Noah Fant, Tyler Higbee, Logan Thomas, and Evan Engram fit the description of talents who could very well be mentioned with the players above in terms of fantasy upside. However, the projected opportunity shares just don’t reach the same heights.
Fant is the guy with the most talent, but that offense is jam packed with other players bursting at the seams to command opportunity like Courtland Sutton, Jerry Jeudy, Javonte Williams, and (hell, why not) Melvin Gordon. High efficiency in the form of touchdowns and big plays are the path for Fant to reach top 5 TE status, and those are not stats that are easy to “expect.”
The great news about all of these mid-tier TEs is that the draft costs begin to fall considerably. You can draft them all somewhere between pick 94 and 143 on Underdog Fantasy, which would allow you to focus on the other positions much earlier in your draft. The trade-off is needing to hit the luckier end of their expectation curve to match the very top TEs, but there is reason to have hope for all 4 mentioned with Fant leading the charge.
Should You Pay for One of the Top Tight Ends?
Recap so far:
— Top TEs don’t spike like Top WRs
— Top TEs are priced well relative to other TEs
— A pair of TEs on bad teams have some upside to be top TEs
— Players farther down the TE board aren’t highly likely to reach top TE levels.
With these thoughts in mind, I believe that aiming at the increased volatility associated with the WR position is more preferable if you find yourself tempted to take a top TE. This is not an open and shut case: you WILL see contending teams with one of the three major stars. However, having Tyreek Hill (who has weekly ceilings between 26 and 28) seems like a more logical place to find champion week upside than Kelce (who has weekly ceilings between 23 and 25). D.K. Metcalf and A.J. Brown can deliver 4 and 5 times the expected spike potential to your championship weeks than Darren Waller or George Kittle. We love these top tight ends. They are fantastic. They may even make me sorry for writing this, but the volatility data suggests I might be better off with a wideout or running back.
As for Pitts and Andrews, there is more room for debate but I can still pick up some pretty tasty options right where I have to draft these guys. Players like Adam Thielen, Cooper Kupp, JaMarr Chase, Tee Higgins, and difference making quarterbacks are all on the board between pick 45 and 60. Josh Allen, Kyler Murray, and Lamar Jackson are unquestioned in their ability to help carry a week in the championship rounds. It is beyond fair to say they are more likely to do so – even on a relative positional basis – than Pitts or Andrews.
So that leaves you with two options at TE:
— Aim for Goedert in the early middle rounds to give yourself a chance at maximum upside.
— Gamble on the best ball lotto of later TEs looking for a perfectly timed combination of spikes.
I absolutely love Dallas Goedert after going through this analysis, but I will often find myself choosing option two and hoping for the best.
Appendix A: My Favorite Lottery Tickets
— Adam Trautman – 6.29 expected strikes, ADP 130
— Jonnu Smith – 6.13 expected strikes, ADP 151
— Hunter Henry – 5.71 expected strikes, ADP 162
— Anthony Firkser – 5.74 expected strikes, ADP 168