Week 12 Fantasy Football Defensive Matchup Exploitation: TE

It’s a good week to own a tight end with four of the top tight end defenses on a bye. Unfortunately, a lot of our top fantasy tight ends like Julius Thomas, Jordan Reed (if healthy), Tony Gonzalez, and Antonio Gates all have difficult matchups to deal with.

The Chiefs certainly won’t allow Gates to go off on them but he is averaging 7.6 targets per game over his last five so he remains startable on volume alone. The Niners have yet to give up more than 60 yards to any tight end this season so Reed will be touchdown dependent if he does play. The Saints have been very tough on tight ends as well so a banged up Gonzalez doesn’t make for a very appealing start. I would certainly roll out Julius Thomas against the Pats though, and every week.

On the favorable side, Coby Fleener, Garrett Graham, Vernon Davis, Greg Olsen, Rob Gronkowski, Jason Witten, and Jimmy Graham are all must-starts this week. Andrew Quarless, Dallas Clark, Brandon Myers, Mychal Rivera, and Jared Cook have favorable matchups but have been too unreliable to start. John Carlson could be a sneaky start against Green Bay though.

Let’s take a look at how all of the tight end matchups are shaping up for Week 12.

Browse Matchups by Position: QB – RB – WR – TE

Highly Unfavorable, Unfavorable, Neutral, Slightly Favorable, Favorable

*Values based on Yahoo standard scoring.

Browse Matchups by Position: QB – RB – WR – TE

Igor Derysh

Igor Derysh is Editor-at-Large at XN Sports and has been featured in The Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Herald, Baltimore Sun, Orlando Sun-Sentinel, and FantasyPros. He has previously covered sports for COED Magazine, Fantasy Alarm, and Manwall.com. Follow @IgorDerysh !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');

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