Because we have covered every passing position except tight end in the "best of/worst of" 2007 series so far, it seems only right to review that position in this week's segment. The previous installments detailed the vertical impact of various players, but for this article I thought it would be interesting to take a look at how well each tight end performs when he is flexed out as a wide receiver.
Glossary of terms
There are usually only a few tight ends who have high pass-attempt totals, so the qualifying mark here is 48 total attempts (i.e., an average of three overall attempts per game, regardless of whether the tight end was flexed out). The yardage totals once again include "pass in the air" penalty attempts and yards (i.e., penalty yards from pass interference, defensive holding, illegal contact, etc., have been added to each player's receiving yardage stats).
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(I did make a qualifying exception for Quinn Sypniewski of the Ravens. Sypniewski had only 47 attempts, so he technically wouldn't have qualified, but I wanted to see the potential impact his loss to a knee injury for the 2008 season could have on Baltimore and thus decided to include him.)
Let's start by taking a look at the flex tight end totals from 2007 on a yards-per-attempt basis. Because only 25 tight ends had enough attempts to be considered qualifiers, we'll just list the entire group rather than break it up into top 10/bottom 10.
WR Att WR Yds WR YPA
Heath Miller 14 189 13.5
Vernon Davis 11 132 12.0
Zach Miller 12 124 10.3
Owen Daniels 18 181 10.1
Ben Watson 27 263 9.7
The top wide receivers in a season will typically average somewhere around 10 YPA, so the top 10 in this group does a terrific job as faux wideouts.
On an individual basis, Benjamin Watson and Heath Miller stand out because of their improvement in this category over their 2006 totals. Miller nearly doubled his 6.8 YPA and Watson added more than 2 yards to his 7.4 total.
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Two big-name tight ends who underperformed as wide receivers were Randy McMichael and Alge Crumpler, but they have historically performed badly in this area (McMichael had a 4.2 YPA in 2006, Crumpler 6.2). So this showing was not unexpected.
One player whose poor showing does come as a surprise is Greg Olsen. Olsen had highly touted receiving skills coming out of the University of Miami, and it was thought that he would be able to serve quite effectively as an alternate wide receiver in the Bears' offense. It turns out Olson wasn't even Chicago's best flex tight end; Desmond Clark notched nearly as many yards as Olson (122 to 137) on just more than half as many attempts.
The other item of note is how often Kellen Winslow was thrown to from a flexed position. His 105 attempts nearly equaled the flex attempt totals of Antonio Gates and Tony Gonzalez combined. They were also 74.5 percent of his overall attempts.
That seems like a phenomenal total, and it led me to wonder how Winslow compares with other tight ends in this category. The top 10 in that area are above.
It turns out that Winslow's number is very impressive, but it doesn't quite put him in a class by himself. Chris Baker's 71.7 percent showing here and his equal showing to Jeremy Shockey in the flex YPA total may be indicators as to why Baker feels his value to the Jets is higher than the team seems to think it is.
One other barometer of flex tight end performance is how well these players perform as flex tight ends versus when they're lined up as a standard tight end. I decided to track this on a plus/minus YPA basis, with "plus" meaning that the player did better when flexed out. Here are those totals:
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Vernon Davis 6.3
Heath Miller 5.2
Zach Miller 3.9
Ben Watson 3.6
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If this chart is any indicator, San Francisco, Pittsburgh and Oakland should do all they can to flex their guys out more often.
