2023 Fantasy Football Blind Resumes – TE Edition

April 13, 2023

Rob takes a deep dive into seven blind tight end resumes to compare their 2022 stats to see if the difference in their 2023 ADP can be explained.

This is the final installment of the blind resume series, having already tackled nine blind wide receiver resumes which can be found here, and eight blind running back resumes which can be found here. In this installment, we'll be looking at seven blind tight end resumes that should help fantasy managers identify some players that are overpriced and others who are significantly underpriced.

The tight end position can be one of the trickiest to figure out in fantasy football, especially if you bypassed the position early and chose to attack the position with some late-round dart throws. That's not the worst idea and could've meant landing Evan Engram last year. There's no sure thing when it comes to tight ends so it's important to find appropriate value in your fantasy draft. Consider each player's upside. Having TE9, who technically, is a TE1, doesn't mean nearly as much as you might think it does. It just doesn't move the needle very much.

As we get to our seven blind resumes, there are a few statistics to pay attention to. The first is targets per game. Tight ends absolutely need volume. The more routes a tight end runs, the more opportunity they have to earn those targets. Red zone targets are also really important for tight ends, just remember those don't always translate year to year. Let's get started and see if we can't change some of your opinions on these players if we take away their names and some of our prior biases.

Blind Resume No. 1

UD-ADP = Underdog ADP     TE-Rank = Current TE ranking on Underdog     TPG = Targets Per Game     TS = Target Share

RPG = Receptions Per Game     YPG = Yards Per Game     RZ TPG = Red Zone Targets Per Game     AYPG = Air Yards Per Game

aDot = Average Depth of Target     RRPG = Routes Run Per Game     YPRR = Yards Per Route Run     TPRR = Targets Per Route Run

PPR-PPG = Full-PPR PPG     x-PPR PPG = Expected Full-PPR PPG

On the surface, anyone looking at these two players is going to choose player one in a vacuum if the price is not a factor and they should. The upside for player one with a 26.6% target share and 30% target rare is significantly higher than player two. However, it should be noted that player one was in his second season last year, while player two was a rookie. The point is, it would be fair to expect some improvement for player two entering his second year.

If you eliminate the target share, however, these players were incredibly similar last year. Their targets per game were identical, as were their receptions per game and yards per game. Player one had slightly more red zone targets per game and a decent amount of more air yards per game, which for tight ends, is an important metric for fantasy scoring. Even though player one had more air yards per game, player two finished in the top five for the position, so he finished as an elite option in this statistical category.

From a yard-per-route run perspective, both players were very efficient players. Another difference in their statistical profiles is in their routes run per game. You can see that player two has a significant advantage in this category and it’s because, despite a much lower target share and target per route run, he was able to handle roughly the same number of targets.

Player one’s team was in the bottom three for pass attempts in 2022 and based on their current quarterback situation, fantasy managers shouldn’t be expecting a major change in their operating procedure. While their overall volume may slightly increase in relation to the rest of the NFL, his offense will again be one of the most run-heavy systems in the league.

Meanwhile, player two’s team was right around the league average for pass attempts. Conversely, player two’s team offense finished in the bottom three for points scored, while player one’s offense was about league average.

Without considering the price, it’s clear to see that player one is the better option and is significantly more likely to provide high-end tight end production. That said, player two is a poor man’s version of player one and is six and a half rounds cheaper. At cost, who would you prefer to be your tight end in 2023?

Blind Resume No. 1 Reveal

Player one, as I’m sure you’ll all be well aware of by now is Kyle Pitts. Player two is Greg Dulcich of the Denver Broncos, using only the games in which he appeared following his return from injury. If you’re team Kyle Pitts here, I don’t blame you. His upside is infatuating, but it’s fair to wonder if he’ll reach that upside in 2023 considering the Falcons’ quarterback situation and the offensive system he’ll be playing under.

On the other side, new head coach Sean Payton will have a positive impact on Denver’s offense. It cannot possibly get any worse and the improvement could be fairly significant. Payton also has a history of utilizing his tight end in a big way in his offenses.

Dulchich had a fantastic rookie season and finished with 55 targets, 33 receptions, and 411 yards in 10 games. Over a 17-game season, he was on pace for 94 targets, 56 receptions, and 699 yards. That’s quite the rookie season for a tight end especially considering how poorly Russell Wilson played and the putridness of Denver’s offense.

Any positive impact Payton is able to bring could go a long way for Dulcich. It’s also been rumored Jerry Jeudy or Courtland Sutton could be traded before the start of the season, which would put Dulcich in a great spot to become Wilson’s preferred No. 2 target.

If you want to pick Kyle Pitts here in this blind comparison, I don’t blame you. I understand his appeal, but Dulcich is one of the best late-round tight ends this season who has a great chance of turning in a top-10 season. If you don’t want to spend the draft capital to get Pitts on your own, Dulcich should be a prime target later.

Blind Resume No. 2

This one should definitely have you second-guessing how you feel about both of these players because based on the statistics above, their ADP and tight end rank should be flip-flopped.

Player two averaged more targets per game, more red zone targets per game, more air yards per game, and had a significantly higher expected full-PPR PPG average. Player two also had a significantly higher target share and target-per-route run rate. Player one had a slight advantage in receptions per game and yards per game, but the difference for both statistics was minimal. So, what gives?

The difference in their ADP isn’t coming from anything specific to these players, but rather the teams they play for. Player one’s offense was top-five in scoring and player two’s offense was in the bottom 10. Player two’s offense actually had more passing attempts by roughly two per game, but player one’s offense averaged 41 more passing yards and 0.76 more passing touchdowns per game. These numbers are the ones that are inflating player one’s ADP and subsequently deflating player two’s, but should it be that way?

There’s no reason to expect a big difference in player one’s offense. They’re going to be a top-five offense again, but there’s reason to believe that player two’s offense could be better in 2023 than it was in 2022. Here’s the thing to consider, however, even though player one’s team averaged significantly more points per game as a team than player two’s team, it was player two who averaged more red zone targets per game and thus, had more scoring opportunities per game than player one.

I’d imagine we’re all on board with selecting player two here at cost, which is a difference of more than three and a half rounds between them. Player one is currently in the fifth round, while player two can be had in the ninth.

Blind Resume No. 2 Reveal

Player one is Dallas Goedert. Player two is Pat Freiermuth. Week 5 was removed from his sample because, in a rare occurrence, Freiermuth played just 50% of the team’s snaps and ran a route just 38% of the team. He wasn’t below 51% in any other game last year making Week 5 a very odd outlier.

As you can imagine, their teams, the Eagles and Steelers, respectively are driving Goedert’s price up and Freiermuth’s price down. Jalen Hurts and Kenny Pickett is the primary factors for this, but it’s fair to expect the Steelers' offense to be slightly better in 2023, along with Kenny Pickett himself.

The team started Mitchell Trubisky for a few games to start the season in 2022 and Pickett was just a rookie himself. It’s fair to expect more consistent quarterback play this season, even if you don’t expect the quarterback play to be good, at the very least, it should be better.

Chase Claypool was also traded midseason last year and with his absence in 2023, should theoretically create an opportunity for Freiermuth to earn more targets this year. Certainly, George Pickens will pick up some of that slack, but there is a chance that the third-year tight end could carve out an even bigger role in the Pittsburgh offense.

While Goedert is a fantastic player, his team and quarterback are inflating his ADP much higher than his statistics would otherwise indicate. Fantasy managers would be wise to bypass Goedert and target Freiermuth 3-4 rounds later.

Blind Resume No. 3

This one is pretty crazy too because player one is a household name and is four rounds more expensive than player two. However, when you look at their statistics from 2022, where is the difference? Their targets, receptions per game, yards per game, air yards per game, aDot, routes run per game, and targets per route run are almost all the same. The one statistic that can swing tight end scoring, red zone targets per game, favors player two in a big way. Why pay the difference you can’t see the difference, am I right?

Similar to our last comparison, team success is driving these ADPs. Name value and our prior biases are doing the rest. Player one’s offense was in the top 10 in points scored and player two’s offense was just below average. Both teams were in the bottom 10 in pass attempts, but player one’s team was a lot more efficient. They finished in the top-15 in passing yards while player two’s team finished in the bottom-15. Made up your mind?

Blind Resume No. 3 Reveal

Player one is George Kittle. Player two is David Njoku. I removed one game from Njoku’s sample because he played fewer than 35% of the snaps as the team eased back into action following an injury. Kittle played over 76% of the snaps in every single game.

Right now, fantasy managers don’t even know who the 49ers’ quarterback will be. Will Brock Purdy be healthy? If not, will Trey Lance or Sam Darnold win the job? On the flip side, Deshaun Watson was dreadful last year. Although, there were plenty of reasons for that. He hadn’t played a football game in a year and a half.

We are all allowed to have our own personal opinions about Watson, but there’s no denying the kind of football player he was in Houston. In his last full season with the Texans, he threw for 4,823 yards, which led the league. He also had 33 touchdowns and just 7 interceptions.

Eliminating the six games he started as a rookie, from 2018-2020, Watson averaged a 68.6% completion percentage, 273 yards per game, 1.8 touchdowns per game, and 0.59 interceptions per game. Over 17 games, those per-game averages would equate to 4,641 yards, 31 touchdowns, and 10 interceptions. There’s no denying the fact that Watson has significantly more upside as a passer than Purdy, Lance, or Darnold.

Kittle also has to compete for targets every week against two of the better receivers in the league, Deebo Samuel and Brandon Aiyuk. Not to mention, a guy named Christian McCaffrey. Njoku will compete for targets with Amari Cooper, Elijah Moore, and Donovan Peoples-Jones. Njoku has a much easier pathway to being the No. 2 target for his respective team every single week and it’ll be rare to find Njoku falling lower than third on any given week. It’s not out of the question that there might be some weeks Kittle finds himself as the fourth-most targeted player for the 49ers some weeks.

Considering just how similar these players were last year and the upside that Njoku has with Watson, the fact that he costs four rounds less makes it a slam dunk. Do you agree?

Blind Resume No. 4

I have no idea why anyone would want to draft player one. Absolutely have no idea. Here, you can see two players, one who is just shy of three rounds cheaper and another one who is six rounds cheaper who performed incredibly similarly. Player one and player two are especially identical. They have virtually the same targets per game, a similar target share (player two with the advantage), similar yards per game, red zone targets per game, expected full-PPR PPG averages, and they scored almost identically last year at 9.0 and 8.4, respectively. With how many similarities there are across the board, why draft player one when you can essentially draft him three rounds later with player two?

Now, I’ll be completely honest, I don’t want much to do with player three, but that’s kind of the point. Here’s a guy I really don’t want anything to do with, but even he, performed similarly to player one, which is just a gigantic red flag.

Once again though, we are witnessing how a team’s offensive performance can impact tight end rankings. And I get it, to some extent. Such a large basis of tight end scoring can be touchdown-based and, in that sense, we want players on high-scoring offenses with pass-heavy offenses. But we all remember Robert Tonyan and Dawson Knox and Eric Ebron. They all had high touchdown totals one year and weren’t able to come close to replicating that the following season, so try not to get too suckered into that stuff.

Player one’s offense was top-10 in overall scoring, while player two’s offense was middle of the pack. However, player three’s offense just squeaked into the top-12. In regards to pass attempts, their offenses ranked 14th, 27th, and 15th respectively. They also ranked eighth, 12th, and 16th in passing yards, respectively. It should be noted that player two’s offense is widely believed to have received a somewhat significant quarterback upgrade this offseason that should help the passing attack and the team’s offensive performance, overall.

Alright, I think there’s been enough context given here. Out of these three players, who are you picking at cost?

Blind Resume No. 4 Reveal

Player one is Dawson Knox of the Buffalo Bills. Player two is Juwan Johnson of the New Orleans Saints and player three is Noah Fant of the Seattle Seahawks. We’re once again seeing how a tight end’s offense and their quarterback can have a significant impact on their ADPs. There’s nothing about Knox’s stats above that makes him three rounds better than Johnson and six rounds better than Fant.

It’s interesting, despite the Saints having the lowest-scoring offense of the three teams last year, it was actually Johnson who had the most red zone targets per game in this comparison. I’m a bit more lukewarm on Derek Carr than the rest of the fantasy community, but even I can’t deny that he’s better than Andy Dalton and brings with him more upside for the entire Saints’ offense.

I’d target Johnson first among these three players and if I’m forced to pick between Knox and Fant, I’d rather punt the tight end position and hope that in Fant’s second season in Seattle, he’ll work himself into a more prominent role in the team’s passing game. That probably won’t happen, but I’ll still take the cheaper option here.

Blind Resume No. 5

We won’t bother with the suspense on this one. With TE rankings of one and three, it seems fairly obvious who these two are. We’re talking about Travis Kelce and TJ Hockenson here, using only his Minnesota stats.

I’m not going to pretend that Hockenson is as good of a fantasy option as Kelce because obviously, we’d all rather have Kelce. His connection with Mahomes is a fantasy football cheat code. That said, Hockenson’s utilization in Minnesota was outstanding. That’s the primary point of this comparison. I mean, for crying out loud, look at their expected full-PPR PPG. It is damn near equal! How can that be?

Well, despite 86 targets with Minnesota, he finished with just three touchdowns. That’s a touchdown rate of 3.4%. In his 3.5 years with Detroit, his touchdown rate was 5.2%. Kelce on the other hand had a touchdown rate of 7.9% in 2022, which was a career-high for him. For his career, he has a touchdown rate of 6.0%. So, we would’ve expected Hockenson to score more in Minnesota and Kelce, maybe not quite so much.

I’m not, by any means, telling you not to draft Kelce. He’s a top-10 wide receiver that you can put into the tight end position where there are only 6-7 tight ends who actually break double-digits. That kind of positional advantage is well worth the investment, but Hockenson in the third round could be a steal, as well. If the Vikings don’t add a receiver in the first round, he’ll be set to smash in 2023.

Blind Resume No. 6

For player one, I eliminated two games from his sample due to injury-shortened games where he ran a route on just 45% or fewer of the dropbacks in both contests. In all of his other games, he ran a route on over 61% of the routes. For player two, I eliminated one game from his sample because he played fewer than 20% of the team’s snaps.

These players performed incredibly similarly in 2022. Their targets per game, target shares, yards per game, air yards per game, routes run per game, yards per route run, and targets per route run were all very close to each other. Considering that, it’s not a surprise to see that they scored very similarly last year and their expected full-PPR PPG average was also very close.

Player one had a slight advantage in receptions per game and yards per game. Player one’s team and quarterback are likely behind the difference of three rounds worth of ADP, but should it be that way? Let’s get to the reveal so we can add important context here.

Blind Resume No. 6 Reveal

Player one is Evan Engram and player two is Dalton Schultz. Now, Schultz is no longer with the Cowboys. Instead, he’ll be suiting up for the Texans in 2023. For most, that seems like a significant downgrade and there’s no denying that it is a downgrade in some aspects.

The Cowboys were third in scoring while the Texans were 31st. There’s no sugar-coating that. The Texans actually had more pass attempts than the Cowboys but still managed roughly 400 fewer yards and eight fewer passing touchdowns. Schultz was without Dak Prescott for four games and had to deal with sub-par quarterback play, which is important to remember.

The Texans will have Bryce Young or CJ Stroud under center in 2023, so the expectation is that the offense in Houston will be much better. I understand both players are rookies, but the quarterback play in Houston was atrocious last year. Both players can be expected to perform better.

Schultz also played second-fiddle to CeeDee Lamb in 2022, but right now, Schultz appears to be Houston’s best pass-catcher at the moment. They’ll certainly add weapons in the draft, but Schultz could find himself very busy in 2023.

The Texans' defense, unlike Dallas’s, is expected to be a very poor unit. Houston gave up the third-most points last year compared to Dallas who gave up the 13th-fewest. Schultz could be a fantastic full-PPR option as Houston finds itself chasing points most weeks. I certainly wouldn’t discount him despite the change in locale.

It should also be noted that while Engram had a fantastic bounce-back season in 2022, the Jaguars will be welcoming Calvin Ridley into the fold in 2023. Marvin Jones Jr., whom Ridley will be replacing averaged five targets per game in 2022. The last time we saw Ridley in action was in 2021 with the Falcons and he was averaging 10 targets per game.

Anyway you slice it, Engram’s piece of the pie will likely get smaller with Ridley’s arrival. The question becomes how much work will Ridley take away from secondary options like Engram and Zay Jones. When it comes to tight ends, unless someone is going to give me top-five production, I’d rather wait on the position, especially when the difference is so minimal.

With Ridley and Kirk in Jacksonville, along with Zones and Travis Etienne, I expect Engram to take a slight step back in 2022, which means if I can draft Schultz 3-4 rounds cheaper, I’d rather do that. Schultz should be incredibly busy in 2023 and should make for a fine, weekly full-PPR option.

Blind Resume No. 7

Player one here is Cole Kmet, using only his stats from Weeks 4–18. That’s after the first three weeks where the Bears hardly passed the ball. They didn’t pass the ball much from Weeks 4–18 either, but there was a pretty noticeable shift after Week 3. Player two is Hayden Hurst. I eliminated two injury-shortened weeks from his sample where he played just 30% and 12% of the team’s snaps respectively.

I am fully aware that Hurst has changed teams and is no longer a Bengal, but the Bears made a significant offensive addition, as well when they added DJ Moore. With both players, we’re going to have to take the above numbers with a grain of salt, but let’s start with their cost. Kmet requires a 10th-round pick and Hurst goes in the 16th, so practically free.

Kmet had just four weeks where he provided fantasy managers with a top-12 week in the allotted sample and three of those came in back-to-back-to-back weeks where he scored five touchdowns. That’s not really predictable. He had two touchdowns in his other 11 games.

For Hurst, while it’s no mystery that Carolina won’t pass as much as Cincinnati, he also won’t be challenged with earning targets against Ja’Marr Chase, Tee Higgins, Tyler Boyd, and Joe Mixon. His target competition in 2023 is D.J. Chark, Father Time’s defeated version of Adam Thielen, Terrace Marshall, and Miles Sanders. It would be fair to expect Hurst’s target share to increase ever so slightly, which will help offset the decrease in team volume, although not entirely.

Still, when you look at their stats from last year, they’re very similar. They averaged almost the same number of yards per game, air yards per game, and had very similar full-PPR PPG and expected full-PPR PPG averages.

Not that Kmet is expensive, but he'll have a very hard time providing much value. Darnell Mooney will be healthy in 2023 after sporting a 27.9% target share last year. DJ Moore comes over from Carolina where he had a 27.5% target share. Those are two alpha-level target shares. There's also Chase Claypool, who in just seven games with the Bears after a midseason trade had an 18.2% target share. That level of target competition will make it incredibly difficult for Kmet to be anything more than a TE2 streamer considering what is once again likely to be a low passing volume offense.

Because of that, if the reality is that Kmet is unlikely to be anything more than a TE2 streamer, fantasy managers are better off just drafting Hurst who will also be a TE2 streamer, but is significantly less expensive and has an easier pathway to more regular weekly targets. The addition of CJ Stround or Bryce Young certainly won't hurt the Carolina offense either.

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