Before the 2023 BestBall fantasy football draft season for Underdog, I set up a spreadsheet to determine whether I drafted the top tight end with one or two other TEs. The goal was to see which combinations worked best and to see what gaps emerged between two and three quarterbacks.
2022 Underdog Fantasy BestBall Mania research - 2 TEs or 3 TEs?
I updated this data/format to its own web page on Fantasy Football Paydirt.
Me: Can you run the same process for tight ends? My spreadsheet has a step or two further.
I ran the same weekly-max simulation logic on your TE workbook, and confirmed your two extra tabs are doing exactly what I’d expect a natural “next step” to be: checking whether the optimal 3-TE build is universally anchored on the #1 TE, or whether some combo of lesser TEs beats it.
QBs (last time) TEs Avg gain, 2nd player+29.2 pts/season+17.1 pts/seasonAvg gain, 3rd player (anchored on #1)+14.9 pts/season+8.8 pts/seasonBest 2nd-player partner Jalen Hurts (correlation-breaker)Evan Engram (+51.5)Best 3rd-player addLamar Jackson, repeatedly varies more, tops out at +42.9
Same shape as the QB result, just compressed — the whole TE position scores far fewer points than QB, so the marginal dollars are smaller across the board. The 3rd-TE gain (+8.8 avg) is proportionally even less than the already-modest 3rd-QB gain (+14.9), which strengthens the “stop at two” conclusion rather than complicating it.
This isn’t anchored on Kelce at all; it’s every possible 3-TE combination from the full 37-man pool, ranked. And the answer it gives is unambiguous: 47 of the top 50 combos still include Kelce. There’s no clever non-Kelce trio that outscores a Kelce-anchored build. That’s meaningfully different information from the QB study — there, you were only testing pairings given you already had Mahomes. Here you actually checked whether skipping the elite TE and hoping for a value trio elsewhere could compete, and it can’t. The gap between TE1 and the field is just too large at this position, more so than at QB.
On scoring context: no adjustment needed here like the QB passing-yard fix. Underdog’s scoring image shows Reception 0.5 / Rec Yard 0.1 / Rec TD 6.0 — standard 0.5-PPR values with no TE-specific wrinkle, so unlike the QB case there’s no hidden discount to account for.
Net conclusion: the case for stopping at 2 TEs is actually more clear-cut than it was for QB — the marginal 3rd-TE gain is smaller in absolute terms, and your full-universe check rules out any “skip the stud, stack value” alternative build. Draft the best available TE, take one complementary/correlation-breaking TE2, and put roster spot #3 into RB/WR depth where spike weeks are both more frequent and worth more.
Me: In today’s AI realm, I could easily take this question another step further for the top combos for the top 37 running backs from the previous season. It would be much harder to use for the current draft season based on projections, because we have no idea what the outcomes will be for each player.
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