Bully Tight End in Dynasty?

Bully Tight End has long been a strategy in best-ball formats, where you take advantage of the positional scarcity of tight ends and take two of the elite guys early in your draft. Effectively, you are taking one to fill your tight end spot and the other one of your flex spots and you act as if one of those guys is your “WR1” who happens to be a tight end. Think Travis Kelce, Rob Gronkowski, or Jimmy Graham in their heyday or Mark Andrews on the Ravens operating as the top target for Baltimore. Hypothetically, if you took both Kelce and Andrews in your best ball drafts several years ago, one filled your TE slot and the other was your “WR1”.

I know it sounds crazy, but a thought occurred to me when discussing a dynasty startup with a friend and subscriber. He was about to be on the clock and had taken Brock Bowers in the first round. I jokingly said he should take Trey McBride and just “Bully Tight End” this draft. But then both of us started thinking, what if that actually worked?

So that is what I set out to find out. Can Bully TE actually work in dynasty as it does in Best Ball?

If you want a short answer for this whole discussion, it’s “probably not.” But don’t dismiss things just yet, we’re just getting started. The kicker is the league my friend was in was a 0.5 TEP (tight end premium) league. So if it’s PPR, whereas a wide receiver would score 1 point per reception, a tight end would score 1.5. So a 10-yard catch is worth 2.5 points, not 2. And that adds up.

I will warn you, that this newsletter might not apply to everyone, as TEP leagues are a bit niche, but they are growing in popularity. And while the vast majority of leagues played every year are 1QB leagues, the ADP I will be discussing is Superflex-based, a very popular format in dynasty.

Usually, when people talk about TEP, they tend to want to inflate high-end tight end’s true value, especially in trades and in start-up or rookie drafts. “Should I pick them earlier because of the bonus?” is usually the question asked. Generally, the analyst consensus is “No, select them like you normally would, and also, every other tight end gets that bonus too!” It’s the “rising tide raises all ships” type of thinking. Every TE gets a bump, so the lower-tier guys get added value too, so don’t overreact to a point bonus when there is value later. But that doesn’t paint the whole picture.

The Value of Elite Tight Ends

In an upcoming newsletter, I am going to discuss positional scarcity in fantasy football in detail. But for now, I just wanted to say this. Many veteran fantasy players know that after about the top 5-6 tight ends come off the board every year (and we usually are pretty good at spotting who those will be), you’re just throwing darts and hoping you hit or streaming the position. You don’t really do that with running backs or wide receivers, though quarterbacks are often streamed, but it’s not quite to the same extent as a tight end. Quarterbacks usually have around the same floor no matter the streamer, but you’re aiming for upside. With tight ends you are often, at least in my experience, looking for a floor with the hope of upside. It’s just a different mindset.

With that said, the top 5-6 tight ends are very valuable in fantasy and there is a huge drop-off after those guys. But what if you had two of them and a bonus? That’s what we’re trying to figure out here. For this study, I’m using ADP from Dynasty Data Lab and 2024 PPR stats that I then modified for tight ends to fit our 0.5 TEP study.

Opportunity Cost of Bully TE

Right now, the top six tight ends in dynasty according to ADP (not counting incoming rookies) are Brock Bowers, Trey McBride, Sam LaPorta, Tyler Warren, Colston Loveland, and George Kittle. We’ll get to the rookies in a second, but I want to remove them for now because I can’t do any PPG analysis on them, they haven’t played a snap in the NFL yet! 🏈 

There is an opportunity cost to be had with running backs, I will be focusing primarily on comparing tight ends with receivers since they largely get their points the same way: catching passes.

Here is a chart of every receiver’s and tight end’s PPG in 2024 and their current ADP up to ADP 216, with the tight end’s having been adjusted for 0.5 TEP scoring.

First off, Ja’Marr Chase’s 2024 was insane, averaging nearly 24 PPG. But, more importantly for this study, should you have the chance to take Brock Bowers and Trey McBride in a startup, it doesn’t look all that bad. There are plenty of receivers you could take after McBride who can give you a 15+ PPR PPG, including Marvin Harrison Jr, who is the diamond just after pick 25 that’s a bit lower in PPG than the others around his ADP. Sam LaPorta is no slouch, and despite his down second year, he still has a bright future ahead of him. If you averaged his rookie and second-year PPG, he’s right in the mix with the receivers being drafted around him.

The main difference between a guy like LaPorta vs. Bowers and McBride is that those two are the clear top or at worst number 2 targets in their offense. LaPorta is not, at least for now.

And this is Superflex we are talking about, so we have to factor in quarterbacks because they are much more valuable in that format. If you’re selecting Bowers and McBride, you are losing out taking quarterbacks. But here’s the thing, QB scoring last year was pretty flat after the first few guys.

So yes, you miss out on the high-end guys, but if you’re in the back half of the first round in Superflex, you were already going to miss out on those guys anyway. You aren’t usually deciding “Do I go Jayden Daniels or Brock Bowers?” If you have that choice, please go with Daniels. But you likely don’t have that option.

Getting back to the TE vs WR discussion, one thing I’d like to note is that while George Kittle near ADP 75 looks like the perfect reason Bully TE can work, we’re only looking at 2024 data. That’s one weakness of this particular study. He had a crazy season, and it was about 3-4 PPG higher than his average year, largely thanks to the 49ers suffering injuries to multiple pass catchers and Christian McCaffrey. And I’m talking 3-4 PPG higher in regular PPR, much less TEP. So his average is likely much closer to the receivers going around him, which still makes him an option if you went say, Bowers, took some other players, then Kittle, but it’s not as attractive as his 2024 makes it look.

What of the Rookies?

It’s time we talk about Tyler Warren and Colston Loveland. 🐻 

The other rookies are being selected late enough that I don’t really consider them “Bully TE” worthy. Their current ADPs are 61 and 70 in 12-team startups respectively. Using our handy chart up there, the being selected around them (ADP 55–75) are scoring around 13.4 PPR PPG. Obviously, this is dynasty and there are a lot of factors that go into drafts, but if you go with one of these in a Bully TE strategy, you need to start them right away. So, you are asking them to produce at least 13 FPPG as a rookie. That’s doable, but it’s not easy for rookie tight ends to produce to that level. We have just been blessed the last few seasons with studs coming out and hitting right off the bat. 🏏 

And this is where running backs come into play as well. At some point, you will need to draft a running back. Among the backs who played in 2024 and are still being drafted between picks 50-100 in startups, nine of them put up 15 or more fantasy points per game. The middle rounds are a great time to start grabbing running backs in dynasty, and that’s where I would be focusing instead of trying to grab Warren or Loveland to go along with Bowers or McBride.

🚦That is not to say avoid those two rookies, I like both. I’m just saying using them as a Bully TE may not work right off the bat. It’s probably best to grab one as your first TE and already have built the foundation for your roster with other positions.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Let’s sum up. If you’re in a tight-end premium league, it looks like you can go Bully TE, but only if the cards break right. If you want to grab some combo of Bowers, McBride, or LaPorta have at it. If you can get the first two it gives the strongest chance for this strategy to work. Just for proof of concept, I did this 18-round mock draft (3rd-round reversal, trying to replicate the situation my friend was in):

But, I would be remiss if I did not mention some things. The difficulty of this type of study is that I am fitting a redraft/best ball strategy into a dynasty format. There are nuances here that would take a long time to explain. But, while it’s fine to compare multiple years of redraft ADP and to find what your ADP PPG expectation is, it’s hard to do the same for dynasty because of the amount of fluctuation in ADP due to incoming talent, roster builds, player age impacting draft capital, and the like. 

➡️ It’s entirely possible that there is a way to reconcile these things and come up with a better study, one that can compare across multiple years and weed out a bit of the outlier seasons because the PPG we used is just a snapshot of what a player did, not indicative of a career.

In the end, while I do think it is possible to do Bully TE in dynasty in TEP leagues thanks to the positional advantage it gives you over your league mates and the scoring boost, I believe more research is needed to fully understand this idea.