2022 TE Analytical Review part 1

Author: Bill Jones

Introduction 

Welcome to the first part of my series where I perform an analytical review for tight end fantasy performance from 2022. As a fantasy football enthusiast, I have always been fascinated by the intersection of data analytics and football. However, I have come to realize that sometimes data analytics can get a little over complicated, and the vast amount of information available can be overwhelming when looking for easy actionable insights. That's what this series is all about, clean and simple analytics to help fantasy football fans heading into the 2023 season. I will be using basic data analysis techniques to uncover trends and patterns in the performance of tight ends in the 2022 season and provide insights for fellow fantasy football enthusiasts. Whether you are a seasoned veteran or a newcomer to the world of fantasy football, I believe that this series will provide valuable insights and help you make informed decisions when it comes to your fantasy team, so let’s get started!

Ground Rules

Before we jump into the analytics, it is important to set some ground rules about how we will be calculating fantasy points. The my favorite scoring system is as follows so that’s what we will be going with:

1. Rushing Touchdowns: 6 points for each rushing touchdown.

2. Rushing Yards: 1 point for every 10 rushing yards.

3. Receiving Touchdowns: 6 points for each rushing touchdown.

4. Receiving Yards: 1 point for every 10 rushing yards.

5. Reception: 0.5 points for every reception.

6. Fumbles Lost: -2 points for each fumble lost.

Additionally, I want to note we will be focusing on a pool of 32 tight ends (shown below). The data used for this analysis was obtained from pro-football-reference.com, and all games to include where the tight end snap share was greater than 40% to mitigate games where the player may have been injured, playing in garbage time, not yet incorporated into the offense (rookies), etc.. This will help ensure that the analytics aren’t skewed by anomalous game results and allow us to gain comfort in the conclusions we draw from the results. 

Travis Kelce	Pat Freiermuth	Gerald Everett	Jordan Akins	Logan Thomas
George Kittle	Evan Engram	Greg Dulcich	Jelani Woods	Isaiah Likely
T.J. Hockenson	David Njoku	Cole Kmet	Foster Moreau	Chigoziem Okonkwo
Mark Andrews	Dalton Schultz	Hayden Hurst	Hunter Henry	Austin Hooper
Dallas Goedert	Juwan Johnson	Tyler Conklin	Robert Tonyan
Darren Waller	Dawson Knox	Kyle Pitts	Mike Gesicki
Zach Ertz	Tyler Higbee	Noah Fant	Will Dissly

This analysis only encompasses 32 tight ends and therefore it's possible that some of your favorite tight ends were excluded.

I do want to note the removal of some of these games makes for a super small sample size for some players. The point of this series is to show what a player could be with a reasonable workload but keep in mind that a player like Chigs Okonkwo and Isaiah Likely have all but a handful of games removed from their figures.

Visualizations and Analysis

With the ground rules established and the data sources defined, we are now ready to dive into some basic analysis of the tight end fantasy performance from 2022 season.

Our first visualization is a histogram of total fantasy points for all games from 2022. The population average was 7.21 per game with a skewed distribution. The x-axis is total fantasy points, the y-axis is frequency, and the bin size is 2 (e.g., 17-18 are grouped in 1 bar).

Now we are going to define the “Non-Streaming Tight end” pool. The Non-Streaming tight ends are the following top tier tight ends that are drafted high in your fantasy football draft, therefore you won’t be seeing them on your waiver wires. For the purposes of this and future analyses, we will be removing non-streaming tight ends from any analysis related to “streaming”. This is because the point of streaming is to identify favorable matchups and exploit them. By removing non-streaming tight ends from our analysis, we can focus solely on the impact of tight ends that will be available to stream, without our analysis being influenced by players that are not available for streaming.

“Non-Streaming tight ends”

Travis Kelce *	Dallas Goedert
George Kittle	Dalton Schultz
T.J. Hockenson	Kyle Pitts
Mark Andrews	Zach Ertz
Evan Engram	Pat Freiermuth

Above we see a series of histograms showing the scoring profile of Travis Kelce, the rest of the non-streaming tight ends, and the streaming tight ends. This set of histograms highlights the differences in outputs what can expect from the 3 different categories. Travis Kelce’s production shows an even distribution of outputs, with an average of 15.88 and a high floor and high ceiling. The non-streaming tight end pool shows a skewed distribution of outputs, with an average of 9.29 and a low floor and high ceiling. The non-streaming tight end pool shows the most skewed distribution of outputs, with an average of 5.99 and a high frequency of performances under 6 points. It is interesting to note there is an opportunity for high tight end production from the streaming tight ends, but this infrequently occurs.

In the last visualization of the day, I show a bar graph breaking down the average fantasy points per game by point type, color-coded with dark blue representing receiving yards, grey representing receptions, and light blue representing receiving touchdowns. This simple visualization helps show some clear tiers in player production. 

Player specific quick thoughts: Travis Kelce is entirely different than the rest. Of my "tier 2" tight ends (Kittle, Andrews, Hockenson, Goedert, and Ertz), George Kittle was the most touchdown dependent, and it’s not close. Also Pat Freiermuth’s receiving production is in the same range as the tier 2 tight ends and he feels like a likely candidate for a production increase with that offense hopefully improving as its 2nd year quarterback continues to improve.

Conclusion

In conclusion, statistics and visualization are fun, especially when used to gain insights on fantasy football. Through this analytical review, we've taken the first steps in truly understanding tight end fantasy production in 2022. Join me next time as we delve deeper into our analysis of the tight end position!

*This blog post was enabled by ChatGPT. The text was generated by me, and the content is my own, but some sentences and wording were provided by the model. I take full responsibility for all information produced in this blog. More information about OpenAI and their technology can be found at https://openai.com.*