Pat Fitzmaurice has gone position-by-position to provide you with fantasy football draft strategy and advice. Here’s how Fitz is preparing for his fantasy football drafts. His primers include fantasy football draft strategy, targets, rankings, tiers, and more.
Here are each of Fitz’s complete Fantasy Football Draft Primers: QB | RB | WR | TE
Below we dive into some of his fantasy football draft strategy and advice.
- Fantasy Football Draft Kit
- Fantasy Football ADP
- 2025 Best Ball Fantasy Football Draft Kit
- Free Fantasy Football Mock Draft Simulator
Fantasy Football Draft Strategy & Advice: Tight Ends
Let’s explore some fantasy football draft strategy and advice from Pat Fitzmaruice.
Tight Ends
Rookies have led all tight ends in fantasy scoring the last two years. First, it was the Lions’ Sam LaPorta in 2023, then the Raiders’ Brock Bowers in 2024. Kelce hasn’t hung ’em up yet — he just had 97 catches last year in his age-35 season — but Bowers looks like the new standard bearer at the TE position.
Trey McBride is coming off an 111-catch season and is only 25. LaPorta’s second NFL season wasn’t quite as successful as his first, but he still finished TE7 in half-point PPR fantasy scoring.
Two tight ends were selected in the top half of the first round in this year’s NFL Draft. The Bears took Michigan’s Colston Loveland 10th overall, and the Colts took Penn State’s Tyler Warren 14th overall.
The Packers’ Tucker Kraft is another promising young tight end. And we’re still lighting prayer candles in hopes that Dalton Kincaid and Kyle Pitts will start living up to their early-career hype.
Mix the young tight ends with the quality veterans — Kelce, Pitts, Andrews and perhaps a handful of others — and suddenly the TE position looks pretty fertile relative to years past.
Tight end is now a buyer’s market, giving fantasy managers a number of different ways to attack the position. There’s solid value at a variety of price points.
Want to spend up for Bowers, McBride or Kittle? I think you can justify it.
Would you prefer to wait a bit and grab LaPorta, Kelce or T.J. Hockenson? OK, cool.
Wait even longer and try to get value on Andrews, Evan Engram or David Njoku? Sounds good.
Or punt the position until the double-digit rounds and gamble on Kincaid, Pitts or some other bargain-basement tight end? Hey, as long as you’re building advantages at other positions in the early rounds, go for it.
I’m not wedded to a single approach to the TE position in my 2025 drafts, but I’m more amenable to drafting a tight end in the early rounds than I used to be. That said, there will be at least a few drafts in which I punt the position and go dumpster-diving in the later rounds.
TE Premium Formats
Tight end premium has become a popular variation of fantasy football. In TE premium, tight ends are awarded more points per reception than wide receivers or running backs. In most TE-premium leagues, WRs and RBs get 1 point per reception, and TEs get 1.5. In some leagues, tight ends get 1.75 or 2 points per reception.
The format seemingly requires you to spend up at tight end. With the greater rewards for TE receptions, there is an incentive to aggressively draft a top tight end in the early rounds.
But drafting a tight end early in a TE-premium league isn’t always an optimal strategy.
A lot of fantasy managers believe that in TE-premium leagues, where tight ends get 1.5 points per catch, tight ends are 50% more valuable than they are in non-TE-premium leagues. That’s not the case.
Yes, tight ends get 50% more for their receptions than wide receivers and running backs do. But tight ends aren’t only scoring points on receptions. They’re also getting fantasy points for yardage and touchdowns.
Let’s use Brock Bowers as an example. He scored 262.7 PPR fantasy points last season. In TE-premium, where he gets an extra half-point for his 112 receptions, Bowers scored 318.7 fantasy points. That’s a 21.3% value boost.
Let’s try the same exercise with Mark Andrews, who scored more touchdowns than Bowers but had far fewer receptions. Andrews scored 188.8 PPR points last season. His 55 catches give him an extra 27.5 points in TE-premium for a total of 216.3. Andrews only got a 14.6% value boost in TE-premium formats.
I’m actually less likely to take a tight end early in a TE-premium draft because of the way my competitors overvalue the scoring boost.
Since tight ends come off the board so early in TE-premium drafts, good players at other positions are often available a half-round or a full round later than they would be otherwise.
If you decide not to draft a tight end early, you can scoop up value at other positions. If you can figure out a way to get adequate TE production later in the draft, you’ll be ahead of the game.
Check out Fitz’s full Tight End Fantasy Football Draft Primer
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