This Year's League-Winning Tight End Is...

July 16, 2022

Justin Carter explains why Philadelphia Eagles tight end Dallas Goedert could be a breakout performer and fantasy football league winner in the 2022 season.

Do you want to win your fantasy football league in 2022?

Of course, you do! What kind of question is that? If you want to win your league, what do you need to make sure you do? That's right: draft good football players and identify guys who can be had later in drafts who can help you win your league.

Today, we're going to identify who the league-winning tight end is in 2022.

Top Tight Ends Who Don't Qualify As League Winners

There are a handful of tight ends who don't qualify under my arbitrary guidelines for "league winners." Those guidelines essentially are:

• doesn't have an ADP in the first four rounds of a 12-team league (so, outside of the top 48 overall)
• that's it, that's the one rule I have here

Right now, this knocks out five tight ends from this equation. Travis Kelce, Mark Andrews, Kyle Pitts, George Kittle, and Darren Waller all have viable shots at finishing as the overall TE1, but you're also drafting them as if they can finish as the overall TE1. There's not really value there, you know?

When I think of league winners, I think of someone who can finish with a lot of fantasy points, but who I didn't have to invest a ton in to get. That's why my pick for the league-winning tight end for 2022 is...

Dallas Goedert - Philadelphia Eagles

The tight end who I think can win you your league based on his ADP is Eagles tight end Dallas Goedert. Why is it Goedert? Let's examine some reasons why.

First, it's because, for the first time, Goedert is getting a full season as THE guy at tight end. The Eagles moved on from Zach Ertz in the middle of the 2021 season, and this offseason the team didn't really do anything that suggests they want to go back to the kind of timeshare they had with Ertz and Goedert. The depth chart behind him features Jack Stoll, Richard Rodgers, and rookie Grant Calcaterra, plus former QB Tyree Jackson and former WR J.J. Arcega-Whiteside.

So, yeah...I'm not worried about Goedert losing snaps to other tight ends, which is a nice change after he essentially spent 3.5 years in a timeshare. The next reason why I like Goedert is what he's done in the games where he wasn't sharing snaps with Ertz.

One of my favorite fantasy football tools is RotoViz's Game Splits app. The app allows you to filter stats by whether or not another player played in that game. What this filter shows us is that of Goedert's 55 career games, he played 40 of those with Ertz. In those 40 games, Goedert averaged 3.35 catches for 35.4 yards, with 8.69 fantasy points per game. In the 15 games without Ertz, he's averaged 11.86 PPR points, with 4.27 receptions and 58.6 yards per game. 11.86 PPR points would have put him eighth last season in fantasy points per game at the position.

So, a full season without Ertz should mean Goedert is an easy TE1 play. However, if Goedert finished as the TE8, that would just be him finishing right around where he's being drafted. That's not "league winner" status. So, what signs are there beyond "well, he'll play a whole season without Ertz" that suggest Goedert can finish in that top tier of tight ends?

This is where the stats come in. Per PlayerProfiler, Goedert was fifth among TEs in target rate last year at 26.9% but was just 17th at the position in total targets. Why the disparity? Because the Eagles only threw the ball 494 times last year, the lowest mark in the league. They were one of just two teams to not attempt 500 passes.

The Eagles have to figure out if Jalen Hurts is the long-term answer at QB. Part of that is going to require this team to throw the ball more. More pass attempts mean more production for Goedert.

Fellow RotoBaller writer Kev Mahserejian is putting together projections for each NFL offense this year. He started with the Eagles and projected Jalen Hurts will attempt 538 passes this year. Even that small increase in attempts would be pretty big for this offense. That's about 2.5 more pass attempts per game, which adds up.

Kev's projections — which, to be fair, are just one person's projections, but he put a lot of thought into the numbers from across the league. His projections put Goedert at 105 targets, which would be third on the team behind A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith. He finishes at 12.3 fantasy points per game in those projections, which would have tied him for fifth at the position in PPG last year with Dalton Schultz.

These projections also bring us to another point: A.J. Brown. You know that old saying "a rising tide lifts all boats?" Well, I think that'll be true of the Eagles this season. Per PlayerProfiler, Goedert led all tight ends in yards per target and yards per route run last year, and the targets he was getting were pretty accurate. The problem was just the low volume on the offense as a whole, which limited his overall production, even as his per-play production ranked among the best in the league.

The addition of Brown makes this passing game more lethal. It means defenses have more players to defend, which opens up space for Goedert. It also means more sustained drives. The Eagles were fourth-worst in the NFL last year at getting first downs off passing plays, but they led the NFL in first downs from run plays. If the run efficiency keeps up and the addition of Brown creates more first downs through the air, this can be a really intriguing offense that's able to keep the ball and move down the field, opening up more red zone chances and thus raising Goedert's touchdown upside.

How Likely Is This?

Okay, look — a lot of my reasoning here is speculative. And if I was giving you these kinds of speculative reasons why a running back or wide receiver were league winners, I would totally understand if you said "Justin, stop."

But we're talking about the tight end. Projecting anyone from outside that top grouping of guys to have a breakout campaign requires speculation. This is a shallow position, which theoretically should make it easier for any random guy to have a surprising season and jump near the top of the scoring leaders, but that doesn't necessarily happen. If we look at the top six tight ends in overall fantasy points — that top tier of the TE1 group — we don't see a ton of surprises. Last year, Dalton Schultz as the TE3 was a surprise, but the other five guys were Andrews, Kelce, Kittle, Ertz, and Pitts. You could call Pitts a surprise since he was a rookie, but he was also the most hyped rookie tight end in a long time.

In 2020, we saw more surprises in the overall scoring, but part of that was because of injuries. Kittle played just eight games and if we sort by average, the top four in PPG were Kelce, Darren Waller, Kittle, and Andrews. No surprises there, even if Robert Tonyan and Logan Thomas finished as TE3 and TE4 overall, owing in part to their availability as both played 16 games.

The point here: it's hard to find a breakout tight end each year. And for the guys who do break through, sustaining that success is tough. Tonyan and Thomas were non-factors last year after their 2020 success. I know a lot of people think Schultz will be a non-factor this year.

So, we speculate. We speculate more than we would at other positions. We find some decent indicators of success and we take a chance on them in a way that we might not at a different position. I could probably piece some stats together to say Justin Fields is the league-winning QB for 2022 and I'd be very much wrong for suggesting that, even if some signs could point to that.

We're talking tight end. We're talking about the shallowest position in the league. Believing someone can ascend to that next level at tight end is believing not just in numbers, but in luck and randomness. And I think Goedert has the best combination of all of those things out of guys who aren't already considered elite.

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