Week 13 Fantasy Football Defensive Matchup Exploitation: TE

There’s a big gap between the league’s elite tight ends and the league’s typical tight ends. No matter the matchup, Jimmy Graham, Julius Thomas, Vernon Davis, and Rob Gronkowski are always must-starts. Jordan Reed is right on the fringe and Jason Witten and Greg Olsen are just a step below that. Tony Gonzalez, Antonio Gates, and Jordan Cameron have all seen sparse usage lately and can no longer be considered “elite”. Everyone else is just that. Everyone else. That means we’ll need to find good matchups to find truly startable tight ends.

This week, Jordan Cameron has a good looking matchup against the Jags. He hasn’t done much lately but he was targeted 10 times in his last game and Brandon Weeden should look his way often so this is definitely the week to roll him out. The most favorable matchup belongs to Philly but neither Brent Celek or Zach Ertz factor into their gameplan and Celek has been almost invisible since Nick Foles took over.

Martellus Bennett has a beautiful matchup against the Vikings, Charles Clay looks great against the Jets, and Coby Fleener looks like a lock against the Titans. Favorable matchup or not, we’re certainly not starting Jeff Cumberland, Mychal Rivera, Anthony Fasano, Brandon Myers, or Brandon Pettigrew.

On the unfavorable side, feel free to start Julius Thomas, Vernon Davis, and Jimmy Graham as you normally would. Rob Housler, Jared Cook, Zach Miller, Tony Gonzalez, Andrew Quarless, Garrett Graham, Delanie Walker, and Tim Wright are all tough starts this week.

Let’s take a look at how all of the tight end matchups are shaping up for Week 13.

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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