The days of sitting tight (pun intended) and waiting on tight ends til the wee hours of your draft are long gone, folks. Headed into this draft season -- as much as we're all plenty in love with the Wittens, Gates, and Winslows -- the tight end class has perhaps never been deeper with the likes of Dallas Clark, Chris Cooley, Jeremy Shockey, and Owen Daniels rounding out your weekly starters. The conventional wisdom has always been that if you miss out on the elite, you're just fine grabbing any one of the top 10-12 late in the draft.

Not so.

I didn't land Witten, Gates or Winslow in any of my four drafts this preseason. Confident I would nab someone capable late, I loaded up on depth at running back and wideout and tried to ignore the inevitable middle-round runs at the position. Time and time again, I watched my competitors -- ranging in expertise from professional scribes to unprofessional bufoons -- reach higher than expected for the Shockeys and Cooleys, and worse yet, to double up at the position by drafting the Daniels, Schefflers, and Heaps while I was wrongly assuming I was the only owner left looking at the position. 

The results? It hasn't worked out terribly, until tonight. I'm starting Crumpler in most leagues, but in tonight's 14-team PFW league, I missed out on the regular TE run, and then as I somehow managed to miss out on a second TE run, and all of a sudden I'm starting rookie Dustin Keller, and there's just about no one available on the waiver wire.

I'm already fascinated to see how this plays out. Generally, I'm loaded in the backfield; while my competition was taking their two TEs, I was grabbing solid RB sleepers like Felix Jones and Selvin Young. If the TE position remains top-heavy with a bunch of mediocre options, I'll be just fine. But if there's a big dropoff after the top 8-9 guys, I'm going to have an awfully big, ugly hole in my weekly lineup.