A Lion Takes the Throne

Hello everyone! How are you all?

Before we begin, it has come to my attention that, while most everyone plays fantasy football from Weeks 1-17, that I am one of the few that only used stats from Weeks 1-17. You’ll often find total points and points per game totals for the whole season referenced on shows and in articles. To maintain continuity with the rest of my positional reviews, I will do Week 1-17 for this article.

Afterward, to remain consistent with the community as a whole, I will switch to full-season statistics. For some players, it doesn’t change anything. For most, it changes little, but enough that some may have a WR1 season how I went through the data while being a WR2 if you include the full season.

News and Notes

• The Kansas City Chiefs are our Super Bowl champions!

• Pittsburgh released Mitchell Trubisky. Their future moves are uncertain, but I believe a veteran QB coming in is the most likely outcome.

Now let’s dive in!

The Top-12 Tight Ends

• 🦁 Sam LaPorta led all tight ends in total points and points per game in 2023. He was incredible as a rookie and I’m upset I don’t have more dynasty shares of him. He’s about near untouchable as an asset. Even with Brock Bowers entering the NFL, as of RIGHT NOW, I prefer LaPorta. I’ve seen him produce in the NFL, I have yet to see Bowers play NFL ball. It's not a slight to Bowers, it’s just how I play fantasy football.

• 🏹 Travis Kelce comes in next, fresh off a Super Bowl run. It was his first season in eight years where he didn’t reach 1000 receiving yards. His yards per reception were down, and his touchdowns weren’t coming at quite the rate they used to be. He wasn’t his usual dominant self and may not have paid off his draft price, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t useful for fantasy.

• 🪓 T.J. Hockenson finished as the TE3 on the back of 127 targets. Kirk Cousins's injury certainly didn’t help his season finish, but you were pretty happy with him overall. He wasn’t always a difference-maker despite the fantasy finish (hardly any TE really was in 2023), finishing outside of TE1 territory five times and inside the top-6 six times.

• ⛏️ George Kittle either won your week or buried you. To start the year he finished as the TE27, 32, 5, 45, 1, 51, 8, and 3, though to be fair it got a little better in the second half of 2023. That’s the ride you take with Kittle when you draft him. Expect the same going forward.

• 🟠 David Njoku started off the year as cold as could be, finishing as a TE2 only once before the Browns’ bye week. Afterwards though? He was a TE1 for 10 of his last 12 games. It’ll be interesting to see how Watson impacts his finish over the course of a full season, assuming both stay healthy.

• 🐆 Leading the way for tight ends in both targets and receptions was Evan Engram with 130 and 104 respectively. He had the lowest yards per reception of any top-12 TE with 8.5. Even so, he’s a candidate for touchdown regression in 2023 after scoring only three with all those targets thrown his way.

• 🐻 A surprise on this list, at least for me, is Cole Kmet. He had two massive performances that saw him score twice each time, and other than that he was just catching passes doing his thing. Should the Bears opt to draft a quarterback in 2024, I expect him to regress a little, even if it is Caleb Williams.

• 🤠 Jake Ferguson stepped into the role as the TE1 of the Dallas offense and ran with it. I can’t say he was elite, but his yards per route run was a solid 9th best among tight ends.

• 🐦️ One man who saw his dynasty value skyrocket at the end of the season was Trey McBride. From Week 8-17, he was the overall TE4. With his youth and potential, he’s a consensus Top-3 tight end in dynasty formats between himself, LaPorta, and Bowers.

• Taysom Hill barely caught passes in 2023 and still finished as a TE1 thanks to his rushing and gadget ability. Was he useful for your fantasy team? Nope. As a best ball asset he was great but trying to figure out when he was going to receive work was a headache.

• 🐄 Dalton Schultz snuck into TE1 territory thanks to C.J. Stroud’s fantastic rookie year. I had him projected to finish higher quite honestly, but mainly because I figured he’d be Stroud’s top target with the Texans’ wide receiving group being a (seemingly) underwhelming unit.

• Mark Andrews cracked the TE1 group because he was just good, even in limited games. He finished with 11.2 half-PPR points per game and finished as the TE12 despite catching only 45 passes.

Top 20 Tight Ends and Honorable Mentions

In this section, I won’t detail everyone, but I figured I’d hit some of the highlights.

• Kyle Pitts had an underrated season in my opinion. He had the highest ADOT of all tight ends and managed a 1.69 YPRR despite dealing with bad QB play. Only 64% of his targets were deemed catchable, and of those, he caught 93% of them.

• I’ll be in on Dalton Kincaid next year, that is all. Dude is good at football.

• Tyler Conklin, Cade Otton, and Gerald Everett are dudes that week-in and week-out grabbed a few passes, got some yards, and checked out. For streaming, they worked out most weeks. Legends.

• I’m dreading the Luke Musgrave vs Tucker Kraft debate this offseason, right now though I lean Musgrave.

Wrapping Up The TEs

It was a down year for tight ends in general, well, technically it was a down year for Travis Kelce. The reason it felt like such a down year is we didn’t really have any separators. No one had that season. We just had some solid all-round performances by the top 6-7 guys. Everyone else, there really wasn’t much difference between them, much like previous seasons.

That will do it for this edition of Ballfield Banter! Thanks for stopping by and I’ll see you next week for a “Year of the Rookie” newsletter!