Best Ball Rankings: TEs to Take a Stance On in 2023 (Fantasy Football)

Best Ball season is officially here! All summer long, Kyle and I will be discussing best ball strategy, rankings, and values on the Fantasy Footballers DFS Podcast. A lot of best ball players can have success simply by understanding the market value of players (ADP), optimal roster construction, and avoiding basic mistakes in best ball drafts. In today’s best ball content world, there’s a ton of emphasis on these concepts, but player takes are still important and can help give us an edge over our opponents.

To kick off this article series, I started with QBs to Take a Stance On, then followed that up with RBs to Take a Stance On and WRs to Take a Stance On. For this article, we’ll turn our attention to some of our favorite TE targets and fades. Below are the wide receivers that we’re taking a stance on this off-season relative to the current ADP landscape. Be sure to check out our full Best Ball Rankings in the DFS Pass, exclusively part of the Ultimate Draft Kit+.

General Strategy

Before we dive into the specific targets and fades for 2023, I just want to take a second to highlight some general strategy notes:

• Late Round TEs (Rounds 14+) are largely the same archetype. If you have a take on a specific player and/or building a team stack, don’t be afraid to target that type of player. As we know, the hit rate on later round TEs is poor, quite poor. I’ll usually side with correlation when trying to figure out which late round option to select.
• Spike weeks come from the elite options. Per Underdog’s Hayden Winks, the top-7 TEs in ADP the past two years have accounted for 53% of 19+ point weekly performances. If you’re playing in best ball tournaments, targeting some of the elite options makes sense given their ability to produce week-winning performances.
• Rookie TEs are generally a bad bet. 4for4’s John Daigle highlighted that rookie TEs that are day two picks are generally not the guys who give us a top-12 season. Rookie TEs who were selected in Rounds 2-3 in the 2023 NFL Draft: Sam Laporta, Michael Mayer, Luke Musgrave, Luke Schoonmaker, Brenton Strange, Tucker Kraft, Darnell Washington, Cameron Latu

Targets

Pat Freiermuth, Pittsburgh Steelers

Underdog ADP: TE10
Consensus Best Ball Ranking: TE10
UDK Ranking: TE7

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