A Look Back: My 2019 Streaming TEs

In 2019, I wrote a weekly column for @DFF_Redraft giving QB, TE, and D/ST streamers each week of the fantasy season. To qualify as a potential streamer, a player needed to be 40% owned or less, according to ESPN’s ownership percentage data. Here are the links to each article if you’d like to take a look back at my past work.

Week 2     Week 3      Week 4     Week 5

Week 6     Week 7      Week 8     Week 9

Week 10   Week 11    Week 12   Week 13

Week 14   Week 15    Week 16   Week 17

In this three-piece series, I’m looking back at how I did with predicting each category of streamer. In part 1, found here, I looked at the quarterbacks. Now, in this part, it’s time to look at the tight ends. In the table below, the first and second streamers are as I listed them in my article. Then, the weekly finish tabs show where that TE finished on the week in PPR scoring. The average column displays the average of the two players each week. At the bottom, I’ve included a median as well as a means to avoid overcounting the really bad finishes from some of my streamers.

I’ve also decided to discount the four occasions where I recommended a player in my article that was inactive by game-time. My streaming article came out on Monday, so I obviously would not have started these players in a real league if they were inactive. 

Overall Performance

Honestly, nothing about my performance here can be considered appealing. No matter the metric, I wasn’t able to stream a top-20 tight end on average, let alone a TE1. While tight ends can be tricky to predict, I have to think that I could have done better in 2019. There were plenty of streamable tight ends from week to week, but I only picked a TE1 seven out of 28 times. In contrast, I selected a tight end that finished outside of the top 30 nine different times. 

Also, tight ends were so unpredictable that my second choice streamer performed better than my first. Unlike quarterbacks, I was usually unable even to find a single streamer in which I had complete confidence. Therefore, there was little difference between my two streamers, and I often said as much in my writing.  

Interesting Trends

I think we can mostly ignore the fact that Chris Herndon appeared in this column three separate times and missed all three of those games. Herndon spent a lot of time on redraft rosters for someone who played one game in 2019. Between Herndon and Njoku, I think I’ve learned that waiting for players to return from injury is typically a fool’s errand. Focusing on healthy players is a far safer strategy.

Jonnu Smith and Noah Fant appeared in my column four times each. In those eight appearances, there was just one hit, when Smith finished as the TE3 in Week 8. Other than that, they finished outside of the top 20 each additional time I recommended streaming them. Considering that Fant finished as the TE14 and Smith as the TE19 for the 2019 season, perhaps some of this was just variance. They weren’t bad recommendations in general, but they didn’t hit the weeks that I selected them as streamers. 

Outside of that, the rest of my streamers were a mix between high-floor, low-upside players and breakout tight ends. Jack Doyle appeared three times in my column, and he finished at TE9, TE11, and TE23. While that isn’t the best track record, it’s still better than my overall performance.

A lot of the breakout tight ends were a disaster when I put them in my article. My most significant success was probably Will Dissly in Weeks 3 and 4. He broke out early on, and his ownership percentage hadn’t caught up by then. I was able to stream him for two TE1 weeks in those two games. As discussed earlier, Fant and Smith both burned me multiple times, but other breakout tight ends such as T.J. Hockenson, Dawson Knox, Gerald Everett, Ian Thomas, and Mike Gesicki all flopped when I wrote them up. Each of them had some successful weeks, just not the ones I recommended them. 

Going Forward

I think the biggest takeaway for 2020 is that tight end streaming is a nightmare. The value of top tight ends Travis Kelce, and George Kittle is strong not only because they’re great, but also because it prevents you from having to play this streaming game. Even if you only grab a tight end from the next tier of Zach Ertz, Mark Andrews, and Darren Waller, it’s still better than trying to find a streamer. If you strike out on the top tier of players, I also would recommend possibly drafting two later tight ends in your fantasy draft. Finding streamers is so tricky, so it might just be better to select two high-upside tight ends and try to find a regular starter.

As for my article format in 2020, I think that–similar to quarterback–I need to look more at players that are between 40-60% owned. Limiting eligible players to below 40% owned is brutal, and I suspect that far better options might be in that 40-60% range. I want to examine that over a full year of articles in 2020 and see if it’s really true. Since those players are available in a significant portion of leagues, I believe it is essential to include them in my article series going forward.

Thanks for reading this article. You can find me on Twitter at @DFF_Justin. I love to interact with anyone in the community, so reach out at any time! I take fantasy questions and help with all formats, so keep sending those questions my way.