A deeper dive into how the best tight ends are drafted and develop

Feb 7, 2023 - 11:28 PM

Matt’s recent article on whether “Draft and Develop is a Myth,” was a fascinating dive into the extent to which players within three particular position groups - tackles. quarterbacks, and interior offensive linemen - get opportunities to start based primarily on their draft position versus being taken later in the draft and getting the opportunity to develop into an eventual starter.

There were several interesting trends - notably that, as a group, offensive linemen taken in the third round or later seem to be looked at (and to materialize as) developmental options.

Across all these groups, Matt found that players taken in earlier rounds tended to start more than those drafted later (but that there was essentially no difference in the likelihood of grabbing a starting center/guard in the first versus second round).

His analysis, however, took no account of the quality of the starting play, and I was also curious if the same basic trends applied to tight end, a position that I’ve noted in the past seems to have a distinct developmental pathway from most other roles in the pro game.

So, I decided to do an analysis of my own, drilling down on tight ends.

I used the same timeframe that Matt did in his piece, players drafted from 2009-2018, and looked at the first five years of their careers. I added one twist. In an attempt to better get at high-end play, as opposed to the full universe of tight ends drafted during that period. I took the top three tight ends in each draft class - as determined by their “Weighted Career Approximate Value” - and tracked them over the first five years of their career, looking at their performance by year in “approximate value.”

For those unfamiliar, Pro Football Reference’s “approximate value (AV)” is one of the few broadly available tools to try to quantify player performance from year to year.

A description from the PFR site is below:

“Essentially, AV is a substitute for --- and a significant improvement upon, in my opinion --- metrics like ‘number of seasons as a starter’ or ‘number of times making the pro bowl’ or the like. You should think of it as being essentially like those two metrics, but with interpolation in between. That is, ‘number of seasons as a starter’ is a reasonable starting point if you’re trying to measure, say, how good a particular draft class is, or what kind of player you can expect to get with the #13 pick in the draft. But obviously some starters are better than others. Starters on good teams are, as a group, better than starters on bad teams. Starting WRs who had lots of receiving yards are, as a group, better than starting WRs who did not have many receiving yards. Starters who made the pro bowl are, as a group, better than starters who didn’t, and so on. And non-starters aren’t worthless, so they get some points too.”

This netted a universe of 30 relatively high performing tight ends, from Travis Kelce to Austin Seferian-Jenkins (but removing Aaron Hernandez for not meeting the 5 season criteria), to examine more closely.

The figure below displays the results of that analysis:

A summary of the key findings follows:

Finding 1:

Across the 10 years examined, unlike with quarterback and offensive line, it appears that “the best” tight ends tend to be taken on Day 2 of the draft, with a weighting towards the third round. That said, “good” tight ends are fairly well distributed across the draft, with those taken in the 4th round or later just needing an additional year to hit their prime.

Finding 2:

In almost every instance, and across all draft rounds, top performing tight ends tended to get better with age early in their career. There were only two counterexamples of the 30 players examined who got worse from year 1 to year 2: Devin Funchess (who actually played as a WR in the NFL) and Dwayne Allen (who spent most of year 2 on IR). Similarly, that year 1 to 2 jump was the most dramatic performance shift in every draft grouping.

Finding 3:

Again, across top tight ends drafted in all these groupings (and in every round), they tended strongly to improve from year 1 to year 5, with the tight ends drafted in round 4 or later showing the most dramatic gain over that period. In fact, by year 5, the nine round 4+ tight ends looked more like the three round 1 tight ends than those round 1 tight ends looked like round 2 or 3 tight ends.

Conclusion

Inspired by Matt’s creative analysis with several other position groups, I decided riff a bit on the theme and do a deeper dive into tight end play. While it’s not an “apples to apples” comparison, it does appear that - at least among the high performers - tight ends don’t behave like offensive linemen and quarterbacks, that their talent is more evenly distributed across the draft landscape, and that they tend to take a couple of years to hit their peak.

I’ll be curious to hear your thoughts in the comments.