| Year | Name | Team |
| 2013 | Jimmy Graham | NO |
| 2011 | Rob Gronkowski | NE |
| 2009 | Dallas Clark | IND |
| 2007 | Jason Witten | DAL |
| 2004 | Antonio Gates | SDG |
| 1999 | Tony Gonzalez | KAN |
| 1994 | Ben Coates | NE |
| 1993 | Shannon Sharpe | DEN |
| 1992 | Jay Novacek | DAL |
| 1991 | Marv Cook | NE |
| 1988 | Keith Jackson | PHI |
| 1986 | Mark Bavaro | NYG |
| 1984 | Ozzie Newsome | CLE |
| 1983 | Todd Christensen | RAI |
| 1980 | Kellen Winslow | SDG |
| 1976 | Dave Casper | OAK |
| 1974 | Riley Odoms | DEN |
| 1973 | Charle Young | PHI |
| 1972 | Ted Kwalick | SF |
| 1969 | Charlie Sanders | DET |
| 1966 | John Mackey | BAL |
| 1965 | Pete Retzlaff | PHI |
| 1963 | Mike Ditka | CHI |
| 1962 | Ron Kramer | GNB |
With the exception of Jay Novacek and Todd Heap, the remaining 22 players attained their pro-bowl status with their drafting organization. As such, I collected the associated team data (wins and total points) from their rookie season and subsequent three years of their drafting organization, choosing a 4 year span to mirror the current structure of the draftee contract in the NFL. I also collected team data from the prior year to serve as a baseline reference for some paired testing procedures.
To illustrate the team contribution of an eventual pro-bowl tight end, I generated some 95% confidence intervals of the season win percentage. In our sample it appears that an eventual pro-bowl tight end was often the difference between a losing and winning season:
Comparing the initial 4 year tenure of these eventual AP-1st Team Tight Ends to the baseline data, we see there's a initial bump of about 10% in win percentage during their rookie year, followed by another 9% increase their sophomore season, with only a small drop off of less than 3% in the 3rd and 4th years respectively, which is still significantly better than the team baseline of the year prior to their NFL draft:
We could have conducted a similar procedure based on points per game, but the graphs look pretty much the same, so let's just summarize in tabular form:
We could have conducted a similar procedure based on points per game, but the graphs look pretty much the same, so let's just summarize in tabular form:
Prior Yr
|
Rookie
|
2nd Year
|
3rd Year
|
4th Year
|
|
Mean Pts/Gm
|
20.7
|
23.3
|
24.6
|
25.0
|
23.9
|
Lower 95%
|
17.7
|
20.1
|
20.7
|
21.8
|
21.0
|
Upper 95%
|
23.8
|
26.4
|
28.5
|
28.3
|
26.9
|
Mean change
|
-
|
2.5
|
3.9
|
4.3
|
3.2
|
Lower 95%
|
-
|
-0.3
|
1.3
|
2.3
|
0.4
|
Upper 95%
|
-
|
5.3
|
6.4
|
6.3
|
6.0
|
It's pretty clear from these figures that these AP 1st Team Tight-ends make a significant contribution to the team: to summarize, AP 1st team tight ends make a marginal contribution during their rookie year of an additional 2.5 points per game (95% CI: -0.3 to 5.3) translating to an additional 1.6 games (per 16 game schedule) their rookie year. Subsequently, these players making the leap in subsequent years to contribute 3.9 (95% CI: 1.3-6.4), 4.3 (95% CI: 2.3-6.3), and 3.2 (95% CI: 0.4-6.0) additional points per game translating to 3.0, 2.6, and 2.4 additional wins over the course of the last three 16 game season in their rookie contracts. All-in-all this amounts to nearly 10 additional wins over the course of the 4 year structure of current-day rookie contract for a AP-1st team caliber NFL tight end. Estimating the 2015 dollar value of these players based on their overall draft pick numbers resulted in an average contract of a little less than $4 million over 4 years, averaging out to about $400K per win
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