Growing TE Issue

[Nathan S.]

I thought I'd bring this to notice because it is getting quite absurd. My TE is one of the ones exploiting it as well. Kellen Winslow currently has 18 TD catches and the top 6 or 7 in TD catches are all TEs. They are almost impossible to stop. I'm not sure what the issue is, but even if it hurts Denver I'd like to see it fixed.

Any reasoning would be great!

[Goodell]

I thought I'd bring this to notice because it is getting quite absurd. My TE is one of the ones exploiting it as well. Kellen Winslow currently has 18 TD catches and the top 6 or 7 in TD catches are all TEs. They are almost impossible to stop. I'm not sure what the issue is, but even if it hurts Denver I'd like to see it fixed.

Any reasoning would be great!

Yeah, it's something to look at for keeping stats more realistic as would be ideal. Red zone passing TDs, though, are completely driven by the QB update. If a team is in scoring possition and a pass is called and the QB has TDs remaining in his update it's going to be a score and 7 points no matter what. Who that catch goes to won't really change what matters most in terms of the scoreboard and wins and losses but will impact individual stats as noted. But it shouldn't be a TE who is impossible to stop there, as the QB update determines if an automatic TD score or not only.

If you have a QB on your sim team that has a lot of success passing and TDs in his update, when he's in the red zone he's going to get those TDs no matter if his receivers have TDs or not. Somebody's got to catch the ball from a QB with that TD and automatic score in the update. It first looks for receivers who have TDs in their own updates to match those up. If no other receivers with TDs, it looks to the receiver targets that are likely to be the next targets based upon their yardage and catches left. There was a question raised before during the off-season about TEs maybe getting more TDs than they should, but some of the examples were from teams with really strong TEs who were amongst the teams' better receivers. As mentioned then, the system does not currently care about cummulative season stats, it only looks at the game update without care of how many TDs on the whole season. I mentioned before that it's something to look at possibly having the system look at cummulative season stats but not something urgent now. I'll check if there is something in there giving a bias toward TEs when trying to find a TD target from a QB with a TD but no receivers having that in their update, but thought it was mostly driven by going to the guy who would normally get a pass next anyway going off the formula used for picking between one of the recievers with the highest catches/yardage left in his update.

But it does seem like TEs get more TDs than they should and I can't find an immediate reason for that but will keep looking at it, and hope to do more with revising the sim as hoped last off-season but ran out of time before we had to start simming games again. Thanks for keeping an eye on it, though, and we'll hope to improve the simulated results each year and this is one area that probably needs attention toward it related to individual stats over a season.