As we pass the midpoint of the fantasy football regular season, the depth you carry on your roster is more important than ever. The next…
As we pass the midpoint of the fantasy football regular season, the depth you carry on your roster is more important than ever.
The next three weeks have substantially more teams on bye, injuries continue to pile up, and teams, for the most part, have tipped their hands as to which personnel are more favored in the offensive game plan.
With running backs and wide receivers being your bread and butter, stocking up on them is vital. To make room for more, sacrifices must be made. Extra kickers and defenses should have already been jettisoned, which means it is time to clean house even further and rid yourself of those extra tight ends.
If you invested in a tight end such as Travis Kelce or Zach Ertz, you have certain expectations that have largely been met. If you bargain-shopped, you’ll take what you can get each week and be happy.
But there is a distinct separation between tight ends who continuously produce and those who do not. If you look at the overall point-production, you’ll notice that if you don’t own one of the top-tier players, it doesn’t matter who you have. Any warm body who sees a handful of targets each week will suffice.
In PPR scoring formats, you’ll see the top four — Ertz, Kelce, Eric Ebron and George Kittle — sit head and shoulders above the rest. There is no reason to play matchups with these guys, thus carrying a backup just to cover one bye-week is a waste of a roster spot.
Having two tight ends on your roster who provide relatively equal production on the year is even more of a waste. The difference between the fifth- and the 10th-best tight end is a negligible 2.3 points per game. The difference between the 10th and the 15th is also 2.3 points, and between the 10th and 20th, it goes up to 3.0 per game today, but will decrease over the course of a 16-game season. Yes, sometimes we play in close match-ups, but is choosing between Trey Burton and Kyle Rudolph going to be the difference-maker you need? Absolutely not.
The overall value of the tight end in fantasy continues to diminish each year, yet the average player continues to roster two for no good reason. They may think they’re helping their team by making weekly decisions, but they are not. They actually have just as good a chance to lose points with the wrong decision than gaining with the right one. What would serve them better is sticking to one guy and using that roster spot to add Keke Coutee now that Will Fuller has a torn ACL.
Howard Bender is the VP of operations and head of content at FantasyAlarm.com Follow him on Twitter @rotobuzzguy and catch him on the award winning “Fantasy Alarm Radio Show” on the SiriusXM fantasy sports channel weekdays from 4-6 p.m. Go to FantasyAlarm.com for all your fantasy sports advice and NFL player rankings .
