Among all preseason top-30 TEs since 2012, the best-performing age group relative to ADP are the 33+ year-olds.
It's taken me over a week to process that, especially in the context of every other TE age group. Granted, the difference are very narrow. They've outperformed ADP 48% of the time. The other age groups (21-23, 24-26, 27-29, and 30-32) have been between 37% and 47%. In fact, the "prime-age" TEs in the 24-26 and 27-29 groups have been the worst performers relative to ADP.
There's a lot there, and it's only a fraction of the analysis contained in an ADP spreadsheet I've been developing for over two years, with 50,000+ cells of data. There's a lot of stuff in there I haven't even had time to analyze. There's more stuff I want to add to it when I have time.
The TE age anomaly jumped out at me earlier this month. I had to go back through the inputs to re-confirm everything was accurate. For example, Tony Gonzalez (36 years old) and Dallas Clark (33) had 10 and 22 ADPs in 2012, respectively. They finished #2 and #12. The 34-year-old Antonio Gates (TE17 ADP) demolished expectations in 2014, finishing as the #3 TE. And so on.
But there's always more context, and when you study this stuff every day, sometimes the context it easier to see (and admittedly, sometimes my blind spots prevent me from seeing it). In this case, I noticed a mini-trend within the larger 10-year trend. While 33+ year-old TEs have performed better than every other age group across a full decade, they've been huge underperformers the past four seasons. In 2018, Greg Olsen (TE5 ADP) finished 25th, while Delanie Walker (TE9 ADP) finished 96th. Olsen missed eight games. Walker missed 15.
Injuries sidelined these two a combined 11 games the following year. Injuries and low production diminished other older TEs' fantasy rankings, too. In all, only three of these 12 aged TEs these past four years (25%) have outperformed ADP expectations. Most of them were notable names--guys who were once top-10 or even top-5 fantasy tight ends, and the market believed they still had at least one good year left. But in most cases, the wheels came off.
This summer, as subscribers know, I've ranked the 32-year-old Travis Kelce 18 spots below his overall ADP. The 31-year-old Zach Ertz is 80 spots below his ADP. And even after Rob Gronkowski announced his retirement--before the Bucs signed the 32-year-old Kyle Rudolph--I was urging caution about the hype surrounding the 31-year-old Cameron Brate.
Calling someone like Kelce overvalued is an easy way to turn people off, especially if you have him in dynasty, or if you're dead-set on drafting him in the second round of a PPR league. And I get it: for years he's been as reliably elite as any TE in history. While not in the same category, Olsen was the preseason TE3 for three straight summers, the last coming in 2017 when he was 32 years old. He'd put together three straight 1,000-yard campaigns and hadn't missed a game in over five seasons. Then it all fell apart in 2017, and the interesting thing is, the market still believed in him in 2018, ranking him as the TE5. He played barely half of that season.
If the market can ignore Olsen's age and durability concerns and keep him in the top 5 at age 33, then it's easy to understand why Kelce is the consensus TE1 this summer, and why he'll probably be top 3 next summer regardless of what he does this year. He's a huge name. A legend. The market sees last year's modest dip as a hiccup, not the start of a new trend line. He's still the best.
The big question is, what does it take for the market to recognize that someone is no longer the best? Or in the case of Olsen or Walker or Jimmy Graham or other former short- and long-term stars, when does age significantly factor into player values?
So this is about more than Kelce or Ertz. It's trying to understand how the market overestimated most 33+ year-old TEs the last four years after underestimating most of them the previous six years. Some of it can be chalked up to simple good luck or bad luck. But I believe over time, luck evens out. And perhaps the relatively huge success of older TEs from 2012 to 2017 led to a shift in market thinking about 33+ year-olds--that as long as they could still produce, age didn't matter much. And since 2018, we've seen how this pendulum swing has led to a lot of missed calls.
And I don't think the pendulum has reached the end of its arc. I think TE age hasn't been fully factored into ADP. If you disagree, then it makes sense to be all in on Kelce, and perhaps comfortably in on Ertz. Regardless, we'll have more great data to work with in a few months, as we try to get closer to undertanding the correlation between age and value.
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It's taken me over a week to process that, especially in the context of every other TE age group. Granted, the difference are very narrow. They've outperformed ADP 48% of the time. The other age groups (21-23, 24-26, 27-29, and 30-32) have been between 37% and 47%. In fact, the "prime-age" TEs in the 24-26 and 27-29 groups have been the worst performers relative to ADP.
There's a lot there, and it's only a fraction of the analysis contained in an ADP spreadsheet I've been developing for over two years, with 50,000+ cells of data. There's a lot of stuff in there I haven't even had time to analyze. There's more stuff I want to add to it when I have time.
The TE age anomaly jumped out at me earlier this month. I had to go back through the inputs to re-confirm everything was accurate. For example, Tony Gonzalez (36 years old) and Dallas Clark (33) had 10 and 22 ADPs in 2012, respectively. They finished #2 and #12. The 34-year-old Antonio Gates (TE17 ADP) demolished expectations in 2014, finishing as the #3 TE. And so on.
But there's always more context, and when you study this stuff every day, sometimes the context it easier to see (and admittedly, sometimes my blind spots prevent me from seeing it). In this case, I noticed a mini-trend within the larger 10-year trend. While 33+ year-old TEs have performed better than every other age group across a full decade, they've been huge underperformers the past four seasons. In 2018, Greg Olsen (TE5 ADP) finished 25th, while Delanie Walker (TE9 ADP) finished 96th. Olsen missed eight games. Walker missed 15.
Injuries sidelined these two a combined 11 games the following year. Injuries and low production diminished other older TEs' fantasy rankings, too. In all, only three of these 12 aged TEs these past four years (25%) have outperformed ADP expectations. Most of them were notable names--guys who were once top-10 or even top-5 fantasy tight ends, and the market believed they still had at least one good year left. But in most cases, the wheels came off.
This summer, as subscribers know, I've ranked the 32-year-old Travis Kelce 18 spots below his overall ADP. The 31-year-old Zach Ertz is 80 spots below his ADP. And even after Rob Gronkowski announced his retirement--before the Bucs signed the 32-year-old Kyle Rudolph--I was urging caution about the hype surrounding the 31-year-old Cameron Brate.
Calling someone like Kelce overvalued is an easy way to turn people off, especially if you have him in dynasty, or if you're dead-set on drafting him in the second round of a PPR league. And I get it: for years he's been as reliably elite as any TE in history. While not in the same category, Olsen was the preseason TE3 for three straight summers, the last coming in 2017 when he was 32 years old. He'd put together three straight 1,000-yard campaigns and hadn't missed a game in over five seasons. Then it all fell apart in 2017, and the interesting thing is, the market still believed in him in 2018, ranking him as the TE5. He played barely half of that season.
If the market can ignore Olsen's age and durability concerns and keep him in the top 5 at age 33, then it's easy to understand why Kelce is the consensus TE1 this summer, and why he'll probably be top 3 next summer regardless of what he does this year. He's a huge name. A legend. The market sees last year's modest dip as a hiccup, not the start of a new trend line. He's still the best.
The big question is, what does it take for the market to recognize that someone is no longer the best? Or in the case of Olsen or Walker or Jimmy Graham or other former short- and long-term stars, when does age significantly factor into player values?
So this is about more than Kelce or Ertz. It's trying to understand how the market overestimated most 33+ year-old TEs the last four years after underestimating most of them the previous six years. Some of it can be chalked up to simple good luck or bad luck. But I believe over time, luck evens out. And perhaps the relatively huge success of older TEs from 2012 to 2017 led to a shift in market thinking about 33+ year-olds--that as long as they could still produce, age didn't matter much. And since 2018, we've seen how this pendulum swing has led to a lot of missed calls.
And I don't think the pendulum has reached the end of its arc. I think TE age hasn't been fully factored into ADP. If you disagree, then it makes sense to be all in on Kelce, and perhaps comfortably in on Ertz. Regardless, we'll have more great data to work with in a few months, as we try to get closer to undertanding the correlation between age and value.
---
Sign up for my 2022 Top 400 Fantasy Draft Rankings ("PFN Pass") or 1:1 Advisory Services ("Touchdown Pass"):
https://pass.profootballnetwork.com/