Here is our record on tight-end Sits since Week 4: Harold Fannin Jr. TE12, Isaiah Likely TE9, Tucker Kraft TE5, Tyler Warren TE5, and Kraft again at TE12. Five Sits, five misses. All five were made for the same reason: the player’s team was expected to score 21.5 points or fewer.
Some of it was the totals being wrong. Cleveland and the Giants beat their Week 4 estimates by 9 and 15 points, and Green Bay beat its Week 5 estimate by almost ten. Some of it was not. Indianapolis scored 22 in Week 5, about what it was expected to score, and Warren still caught seven passes and ran in a touchdown. Kraft scored in a 17-14 game.
The tempting move is to drop the rule. We looked again with Week 5 added. Over 19 weeks of results, tight ends ranked fifth to 12th by projection on teams expected to score 21.5 or fewer finished outside the top 12 70% of the time (56 cases), against 50% on teams expected to score 25 or more (54 cases). Ranked ninth to 12th on teams expected to score 20 or fewer, 82% (22 cases). This season alone it is 45%, on 11 cases, which is exactly the kind of small, recent sample that has fooled us before.
So the rule stays. This week’s two tight-end Sits are Dallas Goedert, with Philadelphia expected to score 19, and Fannin again, with Cleveland expected to score 18.5. Both are in the bottom third of the plausible range, where Sits are easiest to hit. We would rather make them from the middle of the range, but every tight end ranked fifth to eighth in this week’s consensus plays for a team expected to score 25 or more. We are telling you that so you can discount the result if they hit.