Tight End Stats That Matter for Fantasy Football

We are pushing into August and further downhill towards the 2024 fantasy season.

With most fantasy drafts approaching these final weeks before the season, we have one last series to run this week before laying out the positional draft plans next week.

This week, we will dive into the stats that matter the most for weekly fantasy output and which have the largest rollover year over year.

Tight End Fantasy Related Articles:

• Tight End Tiers
• Tight End Rankings
• Tight End Trends
• Red Zone Points vs Expectations: Tight End

Highest Correlation to Weekly Fantasy Points Scored For Tight End

As a reminder, we are looking at every game played over the past 10 seasons here for our sample.

The tight end position repeats what we saw from the wide receivers at the top with receiving yards having the largest correlation to points scored in a given game in each format.

That correlation is a smidge lower for tight ends than for the wideouts, making receptions, targets, and touchdowns more important for the tight ends.

It also makes sense that yardage gained skews to the wideouts more than the tight ends, because their depth of target is the largest of all positions.

If you have not been keeping count throughout this series, we have now covered the primary skill positions, and wide receivers are the position that is the least dependent on touchdown production.

Tight ends are not far away from the wideouts in terms of not needing touchdowns to carry their totals, but this is another example of wide receivers being in the most stable position since they have leaned on touchdowns the least.

This is also usable for DFS.

Using a premium salary for a receiver makes the most sense given they are not as dependent on touchdowns as running backs and tight ends.

The one area that drops here is that snaps played matter significantly less for tight ends than wideouts.

That inherently makes sense since the position is filled with players working double duty in the passing and rushing game as blockers.

Tight ends earn snaps as run blockers, pass protectors, and running actual pass routes.

We only get fantasy points for the successful end of one of those outcomes. Routes run are more relevant than actual snaps played for the position.

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Year-Over-Year Correlation Categories for TEs (Counting Stats)

Keeping up with a common theme throughout the series, per-game statistics make up five of the top six spots in stability year over year.

That tracks since total games played have the lowest correlation for the following season.

The top two season-long statistics are related to fantasy points, something stable throughout the series.

Comparing tight ends to wide receivers, wideouts have more stability in the top metrics above.

Among counting stats, touchdowns are once again at the bottom.

We covered a handful of tight ends that over and underperformed in touchdown expectations in 2023.

Year-Over-Year Correlation Categories for WRs (Efficiency Stats)

When we reach the rate stats for tight ends, yards per team pass attempt carries weight year-over-year.

This was the highest rate stat for stability among wide receivers, but the correlation for tight ends is much stronger.

This is the best anchor for George Kittle, who led the position in this category a year ago (2.03 yards per attempt).

Evan Engram has ranked sixth and second in this category over his two seasons in Jacksonville.

It is not as sexy, but Chig Okonkwo has ranked 12th and 15th in this category in the past two seasons if you are value-hunting at TE2.

Yards per route run is more stable for tight ends than wide receivers despite air yards per target having a sharp drop compared to the wideouts.

While air yards drop for tight ends, they do still support the premise that the depth of a target is tied to the pass catcher more than the passer himself.

The target rate per route run also takes a sharp dive compared to wideouts.

Yesterday, that statistic held roughly a 40% correlation for the wideouts. Here it is only a tick over 25% for the tight ends.

Keeping up with another prevailing theme throughout this series, efficiency-based metrics are highly volatile.

Yards after the catch, catch rate, yards per target, and anything first down or touchdown related per target carry limited rollover for the position.

Closing this series down, let’s recap things for tight ends:

• Per-game statistics carry more signals than full-season stats moving forward.
• Tight ends are more reliant than wide receivers for touchdowns for weekly production.
• Focus on routes run over snaps played for tight ends.
• Counting stats carry more signal than efficiency-based metrics.
• If looking at metrics tied to efficiency, focus on usage-related ones such as team target share, yards per team pass attempt, and target rate per route run.
• Yards per route run is more stable for tight ends than wide receivers, but the target rate per route run is much higher for wideouts.