5 Fantasy Football Tight End Sleepers: Undervalued PPR Draft Targets

Justin's fantasy football tight ends sleepers for PPR leagues in 2025. These TEs are fantasy football value picks, including Brenton Strange, Isaiah Likely and Dalton Schultz.

Tight end is always a challenging position for fantasy managers to figure out. Once you get past the top tier of players, things get dicey quickly.

Identifying the right tight end value pick can be huge. For example, who thought Jonnu Smith and Zach Ertz would both finish top-10 in fantasy points at the position last year? If you got in on them early, you had a massive edge in fantasy.

Here are five tight ends who look like fantasy football sleepers heading into the 2025 season.

Isaiah Likely - Baltimore Ravens

Alright, so I was a little hesitant to include Isaiah Likely still here. See, I started writing this before his fractured foot, which is expected to sideline him for six-ish weeks, thus threatening his availability for the start of the season. Ultimately, though, I took that news as a fantasy blessing in disguise, as he shouldn't miss more than a couple of games, and he won't see a preseason bump in fantasy cost.

Anyway, on to the analysis I was writing pre-injury:

There's a fairly sizable gap between Likely and Mark Andrews in the fantasy rankings this year, even though Likely started taking on a chunk of Andrews' usage last year. Right now, Andrews is the TE7 in RotoBaller's full PPR rankings, while Likely is down at TE18.

On one hand, a team's No. 2 tight end being ranked in the top 20 feels like an anomaly, making it hard to necessarily call Likely underrated. On the other hand, TE18 feels low for a guy with Likely's upside.

Lamar Jackson has proven throughout his career that he loves to get the tight end involved. That's mostly meant Andrews, but last season it also meant Likely caught a career-high six touchdowns.

Andrews turns 30 in September. He just averaged his fewest receiving yards per game since 2018. It's hard to imagine he won't continue to slide, which would increase the time Likely spends on the field and the number of opportunities Likely gets. Expect Likely to post his best per-game numbers once he recovers from his foot injury.

Brenton Strange - Jacksonville Jaguars

Trevor Lawrence transformed Evan Engram from a middling cast-off into one of the league's best tight ends in 2022 and 2023, and with Engram gone, he'll have a chance to pepper Brenton Strange with targets.

Just look at what Strange did in the games Engram missed in 2024. Per RotoViz, Strange averaged 8.56 PPR points per game with Engram out last year, with an average of five targets per contest.

Every Brenton Strange target from Year 2 pic.twitter.com/n9wUVD380X

— Jacob Gibbs (@jagibbs_23) July 4, 2025

In full PPR, that would only make Strange the TE19 in points per game if extrapolated over the full season, but there are a few factors that give me confidence in Strange doing better than that as the full-time tight end.

One is simply that he is the full-time tight end. Having a full offseason to work as the No. 1 guy should help integrate him into the offense more than last season, allowing for more consistent production.

Then there's the addition of head coach Liam Coen, who comes over from Tampa Bay. While the Jaguars targeted the tight end more than Tampa did in 2024, Coen's Buccaneers team did a better job getting the ball to the tight end in high-leverage situations. Jags tight ends scored three touchdowns in 2024. Buccaneers tight ends scored six touchdowns, and that was with the unheralded duo of Cade Otton and Payne Durham.

Chig Okonkwo - Tennessee Titans

Chig Okonkwo is currently the TE26 in RotoBaller's PPE rankings, implying that our ranking team views him as a TE3. And look, I get it. I'm not saying they're wrong for ranking him there. I'm just saying that they'll be wrong by the end of the 2025 season.

Okonkwo was a popular preseason sleeper last year and didn't live up to the hype, catching 52 passes for 479 yards and two touchdowns. His numbers ultimately dropped ever so slightly from where they were in 2023.

But near the end of the season, Okonkwo started to see his role increase. He played just three snaps in Week 18, but in the three games before that, Okonkwo averaged 7.3 catches for 60.7 yards per game. Extrapolated to 17 games, that's a 1,000-yard season for the tight end.

Now, I don't think Okonkwo gets 1,000 yards this season, but somewhere in the 750 range is within reach.

#Titans TE Chig Okonkwo has added lots of noticeable muscle mass, and he's been putting all of that to good use.

His blocking in both the run and pass game has been a real highlight today.

— Zach Lyons (@TheZachLyons) July 30, 2025

The Titans made a major quarterback upgrade with No. 1 overall pick Cam Ward, but the team's receiving corps is pretty mediocre. Calvin Ridley is a strong No. 1 option, but Tyler Lockett might be washed up, Van Jefferson just isn't exciting, and rookies Elic Ayomanor, Chimere Dike, and Xavier Restrepo all have to prove they can be effective NFL players.

Ward should lean heavily on Okonkwo. Not only because of the aforementioned question marks, but that's what he did at Miami last year, throwing seven touchdowns to tight end Elijah Arroyo. Expect his connection with Okonkwo to look similar.

Dalton Schultz - Houston Texans

Dalton Schultz isn't an elite tight end, but he enters 2025 with 85 or more targets in five consecutive seasons. There's plenty of reason to expect that streak to continue in 2025.

Houston invested heavily in improving its wide receiver group, but didn't do the same thing at tight end. Schultz was the No. 1 player at the position for Houston last year and remains in that role in 2025, even with second-year player Cade Stover likely to challenge him just a bit more. Brevin Jordan returns from injury as well, but I think if Jordan were going to ever be a thing, we'd have gotten more signs by now.

That leaves Schultz with a lot of expected targets. While his numbers dipped last season, part of that was Houston's offense regressing in C.J. Stroud's second season. A new offensive coordinator and a (hopefully) improved offensive line should help Houston's offense succeed, with Schultz a likely beneficiary of that improvement.

No one's saying Schultz is going to be a top-5 player at the position or anything, but he'll be a cheap source of fantasy points for weeks when your top tight end is on a bye, and he can fill in as a low-end flex option in an emergency.

Harold Fannin Jr. - Cleveland Browns

David Njoku might be in front of rookie Harold Fannin Jr. in the pecking order in Cleveland, but after an injury-riddled 2024 season, it might be wise to have a backup plan if you're someone who plans to draft Njoku like a top-10 player at the position.

One potential backup plan? Fannin himself, who is coming off a season that saw him lead the FBS in both receptions and receiving yards last year. Even without an Njoku injury, it sounds like the Browns want to get Fannin on the field for a lot of plays:

Typically, rookie tight ends don’t make much of an impact in their first season due to the learning curve of the position from college to the NFL.

Harold Fannin Jr. doesn’t seem like a typical rookie tight end. pic.twitter.com/g0aZ2q2ao2

— The Dawgs - A Cleveland Browns Podcast (@thedawgspodcast) July 28, 2025

With significant question marks all across this offense, the tight end position might be very, very important. The only wide receiver we can definitively trust is Jerry Jeudy. People are high on Cedric Tillman after he had a handful of good games last year, but I need to see more before I believe in him.

After that, it's like, what, the ghost of Diontae Johnson? Who are Kaden Davis, Jamari Thrash, or DeAndre Carter? Expect a lot of two-tight-end personnel.

Plus, the quarterback in Cleveland will be one of Joe Flacco, Kenny Pickett, Dillon Gabriel, or Shedeur Sanders. The first three of those guys will likely rely heavily on checkdowns and the short passing game, which benefits Fannin. The last, Sanders, might be more apt to hold the ball and try to work it deep, but he's also unlikely to actually win the starting job, so that's a moot point.

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