Methodology

TE Premium: Measured, Not Guessed

TE premium is one of the most popular dynasty variations, and most tools handle it with a hand-tuned toggle that cranks tight end values up by some amount that feels right. We had a better option. Because we observe trades from leagues whose scoring settings we know, we could ask the market directly: what do managers in TE premium leagues actually pay for tight ends compared to managers in standard leagues?

What we measured

We isolated clean 1-for-1 trades where a tight end was exchanged for a non-TE, split by league type, and compared the prices. The result: tight ends consistently clear meaningfully higher in TE premium leagues than in standard leagues, and the premium grows again in “big TEP” leagues (more than a full extra point per TE reception). We publish the effect as multipliers rather than quoting fixed numbers here, because we recalibrate them as trade data accumulates and the market's premium can drift over time.

One finding surprised us: the premium ladder is compressed. Multiplying the scoring bonus several times over buys only a modest additional price bump. Managers pay up for the concept of TE premium more than they scale with its exact size, so we treat TEP as tiers, not a continuous dial.

We also checked whether elite tight ends deserve a bigger premium than mid-tier ones. The data says the effect is roughly flat across value tiers, so every TE gets the same multiplier, because publishing precision the data doesn't support is how you end up confidently wrong.

Our base values are already a blend

Here's the wrinkle that makes this more than a simple multiplier. TE premium leagues aren't a niche; they generate a meaningful share of all tight end trades, especially in Superflex. That means our published TE values already carry part of the TEP premium, in exact proportion to how much of the market TEP leagues represent. We measure that share continuously from the trade pool itself.

So when you tell us your league's format, we don't just inflate tight ends, we un-blend. Standard-scoring leagues see TE values adjusted slightly down from the published blend, TEP leagues see them adjusted up, and big-TEP leagues up further. The adjustments are derived from the measured market ratios and the measured market shares, not chosen by feel. It also means the two directions are honest with each other. The same math that says a TEP league should pay more says a standard league should pay less.

Validation

Before shipping, we validated the multipliers against package trades, deals the measurement never saw, since it was fit only on 1-for-1s. The TEP-versus-standard price spread replicated. When the market's messier trades independently agree with its cleanest ones, that's about as good as confirmation gets in this domain.