FF510: Breakout Season Analysis: TEs

08/13/2005 12:31 PM -  Craig Davis

PART I- QB
PART II – RB
PART III – WR
PART IV – TE

What position on offense is always overlooked but often the position which determines whether or not your team makes the playoffs?  If you said TE we would agree with you.  They toil in relative anonymity and really do little each week to get you excited, but if you can find a diamond in the rough in the 14th round of your draft, then you will have a leg up on your competition when it comes time to hand out the league hardware at the end of the season.

In PART IV of our series we will survey this important yet often underappreciated position of TE.

METHODOLOGY

First, for each of the 4 positions we will discuss we have set a baseline series of numbers that must be reached in order to be considered a breakout performer.  Second, for the sake of clarity we set up some parameters for inclusion in our study.  Here are the decisions we made in regards to which players we actually surveyed.

1- Players must have been drafted in the last 10 years (1995-2004).

2- The players first season, for the purposes of our study, begins when they played their first game.
As an example Willis McGahee was drafted in 2003 but because his knee injury kept him out the entire season, his “first” year for the sake of our study was the first year he played a game, or 2004.

3- Only the players who actually played a game were included in the survey.
Just because a player was drafted doesn’t mean he was included in our survey.  Each player must have played at least 1 game in his career or he was left out.

4- We are only concerned with the first three years of a players career in this study.
If a player played in, for example, 1995 and 1997, he was considered to have played 3 years even though he wasn’t on the field in 1996.  The reason for this?  Well even though he was inactive in 1996 he had played in 1995 so therefore his three year clock had begun to tick. Conversely if he a players career didn’t cover 3 seasons, his stats were only counted for the years that he did play.

So that’s basically it, nothing to complex but we wanted you to all know where we were coming from when you read the following breakdowns.  With that explanation it’s time to pull on your favorite teams jersey, grab yourself some form of refreshment (non-alcoholic of course) and grab something to gnaw on cause we’re off to give you the answers you’ve been searching for.

PART IV- THE TIGHT END

The Criteria
Because of the different roles that a TE plays, it was slightly more difficult to come up with a series of numbers to define just what a breakout season would be.  Some TE, for example, catch a ton of passes but hardly ever score (Jeremy Shockey in 2002 has 74 Rec., but only 2 TD).  On the other end of the spectrum there are guys who catch a high number of TDs but don’t really help move the chains since they don’t accumulate a lot of yards (Bubba Franks in 2001 had 9 TD but only 322 yards).  So in the end we went with a little bit of a different system to analyze TEs, we have an either or type scenario.

In order to be considered a “breakout performer” a TE must have caught 35 passes for 500 yards, OR caught 35 passes and scored 5 TD in the same season.

As you can see there are two options given here for a TE to be considered to have a breakout season.  We think this is a fair compromise considering the wildly differing ways that TE are used, and we hope you feel the same way.

The Study

Out of the 4 positions we have reviewed, the TE position had the fewest qualifiers to study (only 161 TEs qualified based on the parameters of our study).  This is not surprising since often times teams use formations that require only 1 TE instead of the much more common use of multiple RBs or WRs on the offensive side of the ball.

Out of these 161 TE eligible players 18 of them achieved a breakout season in at least one of their first 3 seasons (11.2%). However, this number is slightly misleading because there are still 24 active TEs who have yet to exhaust all three of their seasons meaning they still have time to attain a breakout campaign. Therefore, if we remove those 24 active TEs who still are trying to achieve a breakout a campaign in one of their first three seasons, we are left with a total of 137 TEs to be surveyed.  This means that a more accurate statement might be to say that:

13.1 % of all TEs who have exhausted their three-year eligibility, be it through playing three years or retiring, achieved a breakout season in at least one of their first “three” years (18 out of 137).

Remember, that a breakout campaign for a TE can be achieved in either one of the two ways that we listed above.  With that thought in mind, here are those TE’s who managed to achieve a season with 35 catches and 500 yards OR 35 catches and 5 TD.

1st Year:
Chris Cooley (2004) – 37 catches, 6 TD
Ken Dilger (1995) – 42 catches, 635 yards
Freddie Jones (1997) – 41 catches, 505 yards
Pete Mitchell (1995) – 41 catches, 527 yards
Jeremy Shockey (2002) – 74 catches, 894 yards

2nd Year:
Alge Crumpler (2002) – 36 catches, 5 TD
* Rickey Dudley (1997) – 48 catches, 787 yards, 7 TD
Bubba Franks (2001) – 36 catches, 9 TD
* Antonio Gates (2004) – 81 catches, 964 yards, 13 TD
Tony Gonzalez (1998) – 59 catches, 621 yards
* Todd Heap (2002) – 68 catches, 836 yards, 6 TD
Randy McMichael (2003) – 49 catches, 791 yards
Jeb Putzier (2004) – 36 catches, 572 yards
* Jason Witten (2004) – 87 catches, 980 yards, 6 TD

3rd Year:
Stephen Alexander (2000)– 47 catches, 510 yards
* Desmond Clark (2001) – 51 catches, 566 yards, 6 TD
David LaFleur (1999) – 35 catches, 7 TD
Boo Williams (2003) – 41 catches, 5 TD

* = Means that the TE achieved high enough marks in each category to qualify in all three.

1st year, 3.1% (5 out of 161)
2nd year, 7.9% (9 out of 114)
3rd year, 5.0% (4 out of 80)

* The numbers for years 2 and 3 are not figured based upon the total number of TEs in our survey because (a) once a player attained the breakout level, he is no longer counted in subsequent seasons; and (b) not all players participated in more than one or two seasons.

Just what type of season was produced by these breakout performers?  Well because TEs, unlike the other three positions we have reviewed has three variables that can qualify them for inclusion in our study (35 catches, 500 yards or 5 TD), it would be unfair for us to breakdown the performers by year since they could be operating under multiple variables which could skew the overall results (i.e. whether or not they qualified with yards or TD).

However, it is very interesting to note that only 5 of these TEs achieved all three of these statistical milestones in the same season thereby making it almost impossible to come up with an “average” for each group.  The 5 men who did catch at least 35 balls, for 500 yards and scored 5 TD are: Chris Dudley, Antonio Gates, Todd Heap, Jason Witten and Desmond Clark.  About the only thing we feel completely comfortable in stating is that the average TE who had a breakout season had 51 catches in his breakout campaign.

Conclusions

1- Out of the 161 TEs who fit our criteria only 18 of them have produced a breakout season (11.1%).  The yearly breakdown is as follows:

1st year, 3.1% (5 out of 161)
2nd year, 7.9% (9 out of 114)
3rd year, 5.0% (4 out of 80)

2- If we consider in our sample group only the TEs who have exhausted their three years of eligibility, meaning we remove those TEs who are still active, we learn that 18 out of 137 TEs produced a breakout season (13.1%).

3- The average season produced by a breakout TE was on in which he garnered 51 receptions.