Yin & Yang Tight End Strategy 2026: The Fantasy Alarm Late-Round TE Blueprint
Every year we write about the Elite Tight Ends to draft. We write about Tight Ends to fade. This year we are writing about the Bully Tight End Strategy and even including some tight ends with contingent upside. But there is really one particular strategy that has become our bread and butter over the last few years. And that’s Yin & Yang Tight End.
It’s won us quite a few leagues, including last year’s 14-team expert draft The King’s Classic. Big shoutout to our Yin tight end (Hunter Henry, drafted TE14, finished TE9) and our Yang TE Kyle Pitts (drafted TE15, finished TE2). But the real beauty of the strategy is that you don’t NEED to hit the exact right guys in the draft; you just need to generate the right leverage from the position along the way. Let me explain how it works to you the only way I know how - using GIFs from The Office.
What Is Yin and Yang Tight End?
First, we need to know what Yin & Yang tight end ISN’T. Because there is a big misconception about drafting two tight ends. We DO NOT want to draft two tight ends and spend the whole season playing matchups. Your second tight end is not your “backup” tight end in case your starter gets hurt. The plan here is to find a breakout tight end. When all is said and done, we want ONE league-winning tight end.
It might sound counterintuitive, but to get to that tight end, we draft two. We wait until virtually everyone in our league takes their tight end. Meanwhile, we load up on running backs and wide receivers. Then we draft one tight end we call the Yin tight end and another we call the Yang tight end. And the strategy will make all the sense in the world to you once we explain what those terms mean.
The Yin Tight End
There are basically four flavors of tight end. There are guys with a high floor and high ceiling - they are all in The Elite article and go early. There are guys with high floors but capped ceilings (that’s our Yin tight ends). There are guys with low floors but high ceilings (the Yang tight ends). And then there are guys who are simply worth picking at ADP at all (the fades).
The Yin tight ends are virtually guaranteed to be involved. But there is something preventing them from having HUGE upside. Maybe they are the third target or even fourth target on their team. Maybe they are old or slow. Maybe they are in a scheme that is bad for tight ends. But, despite that, you might want to consider drafting them to your fantasy team.
The problem with tight end breakouts is that they don’t typically happen the way we think. Remember the year Logan Thomas finished TE3? Through six weeks, he was TE26. If their breakout seasons, Evan Engram and Jonnu Smith were unstartable for five weeks. Trey McBride wasn’t even the starting tight end for his team - Zach Ertz was. If you bleed too many losses early on, your team might just be cooked before everyone breaks out. So you start the Yin, and you stash the Yang.
The Yang Tight End
These are where the league winners typically come from. As we alluded to earlier, however, sometimes they flat out suck. If that wasn’t a risk, they wouldn’t be going late. Many of them are super athletic or could be the top target on their team. But they might actually not be good at football. Their QB might be terrible, their team, even worse. That’s part of the downside.
But, at a certain point in the draft or off waivers, we don’t care about downside. That’s what our Yin TE is there to protect us from. If the guy we draft as our Yang is bad, we just drop them and add the next hot pickup until we find a breakout. Since we started our draft with 8-9 RB/WRs, we can afford to do that. And a TE has come from TE15 in ADP or later to finish top 5 in fourteen straight years now.
Now, if you are a really aggressive fantasy player, you can actually just draft two Yang tight ends. I do it sometimes. Sometimes it works, sometimes it fails spectacularly. So I just want to make sure everyone is warned that the general strategy is NOT to do this and, if you do do that and your team starts 0-5, that is your fault, not mine. And you’ll have to live with that.
Yin and Yang Tight End Chart
Just like we do with all of our dynamic tier rankings, tight end has a color-coded chart where, after the first few guys, it’s broken down into floor vs. ceiling. Yin vs. Yang. This chart will not only be updated all summer, but it will be updated all SEASON for Fantasy Alarm Members.
That’s crucial to the strategy as, just like with Zero RB, the draft is only the beginning. Zero RB isn’t about just punting running back - you need to care MORE about it than everyone else. Same goes for Yin & Yang TE. You and I are now going on a journey together, and we won’t stop until we find this year’s breakout tight end.
Color Code:
- GREEN - Draft at or above ADP
- YELLOW - Draft at ADP
- RED - Only draft below ADP
STANDALONE TIER
Check out our article on The Elite Tight Ends to decide if you want to spend up one of these guys or not. If you do draft them, that means you have made your bet, and you don’t need to draft two. You have invested a lot into your one tight end, and your season is relying heavily on that player. So just make sure it’s a player you LOVE if you are going to go there.
THE YIN TIGHT ENDS
Travis Kelce, TE, Kansas City Chiefs
The Good
This is what happens when you set the bar too high. Anything less than pure excellence is not enough. I mean, the year before last, the Chiefs starters essentially went 17-2 with their two losses being a regular season game to the Bills and the Super Bowl. That season was considered a failure by their standards. So Travis Kelce not being the top tight end in fantasy football is less than what we’ve expected for his entire career, so many folks were disappointed.
Still, we are talking about the guy who finished TE3. He had the fourth most targets and yards. His route participation, target share, pass block rate, and wide receiver snap rate were all top 10. His 21 receptions against man-to-man were the second most behind only Kyle Pitts (23). That’s an ability that often translates to the redzone which we expect to bounce back as Kelce only got three end-zone targets in 2025 (catching two of them for touchdowns).
We always just assume that decline will precipitate either linearly or exponentially. But that’s not always guaranteed. There’s also a world where Travis Kelce comes out and has one final year that is BETTER than his last few years. He just caught 97 passes the year before last, but even if we get his 2025 stats with one or two more touchdowns, that would likely be a top-five season. What if the party isn’t quite over yet?
The Bad
As much as we like to party, that last paragraph above does have some wishful thinking to it. Kelce turns 37 years old this year, so the odds of him turning back the clock in some meaningful capacity are pretty strongly against us. Yes, he could get more targets and touchdowns, but there are a couple key athleticism-based metrics that are almost certainly not coming back here.
One is the broken tackles. From 2021 to 2023, this guy broke 19, 24, and 17 tackles. Then, in 2024, he only broke 3. That bounced back last year a bit to 9 but is still a far cry from how prime Travis Kelce was escaping. The odds of him getting back to top form all of a sudden are not great, and his YAC totals have been down because of it.
Even more concerning is a key statistic called yards per route run. It basically measures how efficient you are with your time on the field. An elite yards per route run is anything over 2. Most of the meaningful fantasy tight ends are going to at least be in the 1.7 range. Travis Kelce spent pretty much his whole career at or above 2, even hitting an insane 2.5 in 2020. Even in 2023, he was at a very respectable 1.92. Over the last two years, his yards per route run have been 1.43 and 1.47. The Chiefs simply are not looking to him as much, and he’s not doing as much with the ball when he does get it. And that’s been with injuries to guys like Rashee Rice and Xavier Worthy - they are both expected to be healthy this year. So maybe the party IS over.
The Advice
Travis Kelce does not need to be vintage Travis Kelce to be a key part of the Yin & Yang tight end strategy. And that’s because he’s not being drafted as an elite tight end anymore. Depending where you are playing, Kelce comes off the board somewhere between the TE10 and TE13 in ADP. The definition of a Yin tight end is a guy you can wait on, then draft later who has a decent enough floor for you to start in your league. Zach Ertz has been that guy multiple years for us, and now Kelce fits the bill.
One deterrent for other drafters is that Travis Kelce has the first bye week of any team in Week 5. But, for us, that doesn’t matter as our plan is to draft two anyway. You essentially HAVE to either pick one or have your eye on the wire over the first month of the season because you will need to start that player. If you hit on a breakout tight end, Kelce would then not only have name-brand value, but he would already have had his bye week, making him an interesting trade chip. The two games going into the bye are the Dolphins and Raiders, so he’ll hopefully give you some decent points and boost his trade value. Plus, he’s Travis Kelce, so maybe he DOES just end up being your TE all season - he was the TE3 last year!
Mark Andrews, TE, Baltimore Ravens
The Good
This offseason quietly went about as well for Mark Andrews as you could imagine. First, John Harbaugh left, taking with him Isaiah Likely. Charlie Kolar also left in free agency to join the Chargers. That certainly thins out the tight end rotation. Then Declan Doyle came in, a guy who just ran an offense that essentially used Colston Loveland as a “big slot” WR. Loveland finished the season with back to back to back to back games of double-digit targets. Andrews ran 87.1% of his routes from a WR spot, so he should fit right into that role.
The Ravens could have drafted pass-catchers early but instead opted to take a couple stabs on later guys. They took the WR13 off the board in Ja’Kobi Lane then circled back in the fourth round for the WR19 in Elijah Sarratt. There’s been some hype for Sarratt, but we have to keep in mind that, over the last 15 years, we have Amon-Ra. St. Brown, then the next best WR drafted in the 4th round has been Martavis Bryant. So it’s an uphill battle. After the WRs, they then took a couple tight ends on Day Three as well, but most indications are that it should still be Zay Flowers, Rashod Bateman, and Mark Andrews as the key cogs. Jesse Minter did indicate that there could be an opportunity for one of the rookie WRs to play meaningful snaps as the WR3. And, with Kolar, Likely, and also Patrick Ricard gone, there could be inline work for one of the rookie tight ends but not necessarily a huge threat to Andrews.
We like to lump Andrews in with Travis Kelce (36 years old) and George Kittle (32 coming off an Achilles tear), but Andrews is only 30 years old. As crazy as it sounds, Travis Kelce didn’t even have his first 1,000-yard season until he was 27, and Zach Ertz until he was 28. There is a world where, with the ankle injury, the car crash, etc., Mark Andrews just had a little blip in his career and could return to high-end upside in 2026. I mean, he just scored 11 TDs the year before last, the second double-digit TD season of his career.
The Bad
With Mark Andrews, you are betting on change. Because the Mark Andrews we saw last year was not going to cut it. That starts with the deployment, as Andrews only had a 68.3% route participation. With guys like Trey McBride (92.9%), Kyle Pitts (91.7%), and Brock Bowers (88.7%) out there, it’s hard to compete when you are sitting out nearly one-third of the pass plays. Makes it quite difficult to get the ball if you are on the bench.
The snap share wasn’t the only issue for Andrews. Last year there were 70 tight ends that got at least 15 targets. Of those players, Mark Andrews ranked dead last in YAC per reception. His 2.1 yards after the catch per reception put him at 70 out of 70, right behind Mike Gesicki (2.4) and Zach Ertz (2.6). That number combined with only three broken tackles dragged his yards per route run down to a pretty brutal 1.23.
Andrews has never been particularly fleet of foot, so banking on better numbers there is a tough ask. He needs more targets and/or touchdowns. With Zay Flowers likely locked in as a top two target on the team, either a resurgence for Rashod Bateman or an emergence from either rookie wide receiver would put Andrews on the outside looking in for fantasy.
The Advice
Touchdowns have always been the saving grace for Mark Andrews. He’s great vs. man-to-man, which translates well to the red area. No tight end has more endzone targets than Andrews over the last 5 years and, even in a down year last year, he was still fourth in the category with nine. It doesn’t hurt that his QB has an innate ability to scramble around, buy time, and find his favorite end zone target.
That makes Mark Andrews a guy that you typically feel okay throwing into a lineup and saying “okay, he’s going to get me 2-3 catches minimum and he’s got a shot to score. Quite frankly, if you play in standard or best ball, that’s all you need. But it can at least hold down the fort for you in your half PPR or even full PPR leagues while you use a bench spot to find a breakout TE.
On every platform in our system, Mark Andrews has an ADP outside the top 12 tight ends. His average across them is the TE15. That actually allows you to potentially take the Yang tight end FIRST with someone coming off injury like George Kittle or Tucker Kraft. Or maybe you go with an unproven guy like Isaiah Likely at TE11, then Andrews and TE15. People are wondering who “should have been the guy” in Baltimore between those two, but maybe they BOTH are “the guy.”
Jake Ferguson, TE, Dallas Cowboys
We did a full analysis of Jake Ferguson already with the good and the bad, but since it is in the Tight End Fades Article, it’s pretty obvious how we feel. The short and sweet is that Jake Ferguson is not a top two target on his team, and the vast majority of his production came when CeeDee Lamb was hurt. Technically, Ferguson could be a Yin as part of a Yin & Yang strategy, but he’s a little expensive for a glorified handcuff. You could likely get similar production from Dalton Schultz, who goes much later. Or have similar “double WR handcuff” upside from a cheaper Ferguson later in Terrance Ferguson. So we don’t really draft much of this Ferguson.
Isaiah Likely, TE, New York Giants
The Good
I know it’s practically a meme at this point. But there is a reason we like converted basketball players at tight end, like Jimmy Graham and Antonio Gates. That’s the kind of combination of size and dexterity that is perfect for the position. If the NBA were to fold today, roughly half the starting NFL tight end jobs could be replaced overnight. Just imagine if a prime LeBron James at 6’9”, 250 with his jumping ability had the role Mark Andrews had?
Enter Isaiah Likely and his basketball background. That extra wiggle helps him break off chunk plays, even in his limited usage capacity in Baltimore. Likely could have been pigeon-holed into a blocking role alongside Mark Andrews, but he was actually ALSO used as a WR for ~85% of his pass plays. He basically did what is rarely done in this league and carved out his own pass-catching role despite there being an incumbent primary pass-catching tight end.
When his coach, John Harbaugh, left for the New York Giants, Likely was made a priority free agent signing. Not only do the Giants not have a ton of high-end pass-catchers after Malik Nabers (who is coming off an ACL tear), but this scheme is great for the tight end. Fullback Patrick Ricard came along with Harbaugh as well, and they already have inline TE Theo Johnson, so we’ll probably see fewer sets with wide receivers and more with multiple tight ends. That plays right into Likely’s hands.
The Bad
Isaiah Likely is not LeBron James.
In fact, Isaiah Likely is painfully slow. His 4.88-second forty-yard dash is in the 22nd percentile. That’s around the level of someone like Jack Doyle. Since I’ve been doing this, I’ve seen only one tight end finish top five in fantasy in half PPR with a forty slower than 4.8 (which was Heath Miller in 2012). In full PPR you can add last year’s Jake Ferguson to the list, but he only had 600 yards. Guys this slow need to either be peppered with targets or score double-digit touchdowns.
The other issue here is that Likely hasn’t actually done it yet in this league. He’s been in the NFL for four years now, and his best season is 42 catches for 477 yards. We all thought that, once Zach Ertz was gone, Dallas Goedert would just take off - but he never really did. He’s been just kind of okay. So we have to caution ourselves that Isaiah Likely might just be kind of okay.
The Advice
That’s the great thing about Yin & Yang tight end. Isaiah Likely is going off the board as the TE11. He goes outside the top 120 picks in many cases. In a 12-team league, you can literally take 8-9 RBs or WRs, get a QB, then take Likely. Then you circle back for a little bit of upside with your second tight end. If Isaiah Likely is “just okay,” then that is fine, but he also has the benefit of potentially being a top two target on his team, creating a path to even greater upside.
Because we like a lot of tight ends in this range, including a couple going slightly after Likely, we see no reason to reach for him. We really don’t reach for any of the Yin tight ends to be completely honest. But we will reach for the Yangs - the guys with big upside. And it’s time to get to them next after a couple of honorable mentions.
YIN HONORABLE MENTIONS
Dallas Goedert, TE, Philadelphia Eagles - This is the first year we are really recommending Goedert in any capacity. And that’s because it’s the first year that he actually has a shot to be a top two target on the team. Pretty much everything we said about Isaiah Likely is fairly true about Goedert, but Likely has that additional “mystery box” element, whereas we’ve seen plenty of Goedert. But he is cheap enough and should be a solid enough placeholder while we try to find this year’s league winner. Just don’t expect 11 TDs again, as that was a bit uncharacteristic given his profile and usage.
Juwan Johnson, TE, New Orleans Saints - Here’s a fun fact - Juwan Johnson is the only player who has been on the winning Best Ball Mania team on Underdog three years in a row. That’s largely because his 90th percentile speed allows for chunk plays and he has a nose for the endzone. The issue here is that the Saints spent a very high pick on Jordyn Tyson to line up opposite Chris Olave, which hurts Juwan’s ceiling - unless the rookie is a bust or someone gets hurt. Otherwise, Juwan still should be able to keep your team afloat even as the third target.
Hunter Henry, TE, New England Patriots - He’s in The Fades article for a reason here, as he didn’t quite pop last year with opportunity. So why would he now do it with AJ Brown and Romeo Doubs in town? It pains me to say it, as Henry helped us last year, but conditions have changed.
Brenton Strange, TE, Jacksonville Jaguars - With Brian Thomas Jr, Jakobi Meyers, Parker Washington, and Travis Hunter there, how many injuries would it take for Brenton Strange to be a top two target on the team? Three? The floor is there but not the ceiling.
T.J. Hockenson, TE, Minnesota Vikings - See above on Brenton Strange but with Justin Jefferson, Jordan Addison, Jauan Jennings.
Cade Otton, TE, Tampa Bay Buccaneers - See above on Brenton Strange but with Emeka Egbuka, Chris Godwin, Jalen McMillan, and Ted Hurst.
THE YANG TIGHT ENDS
Tucker Kraft, TE, Green Bay Packers
We already wrote about Tucker Kraft in our article on The Fades. That said, Kraft has been activated from the PUP list, so it looks like his practice activities are set to start this month. We will have to see how that proceeds before we settle on his final spot in the rankings, but, as of early drafts, he’s just going a little too early in ADP for a guy whose spot on his own team’s target pecking order isn’t guaranteed.
George Kittle, TE, San Francisco
The Good
I hate to make it sound this simple. But it is. The bet on George Kittle is almost the same as the one on Tucker Kraft, just cheaper in ADP. In fact, we used George Kittle as an example of the good things that Tucker Kraft does in our arguments in favor of Kraft.
Both these guys are “unicorns” as in they succeed despite being primarily inline tight ends with relatively high pass block rates. That’s because both of them break away on long plays at a high level. Among tight ends that are currently signed to NFL teams, George Kittle leads all tight ends with eight career plays of 50+ yards, and Tucker Kraft, despite his short career, is already tied for second with four of them (he’s tied with Travis Kelce, Mark Andrews, and Evan Engram). Given the general lower target totals for the position, chunk plays are incredibly important to tight ends.
Kittle actually has a few things to his advantage that Kraft doesn’t have as well. One is that Kittle has actually finished as a high-end tight end before in fantasy, multiple times, which Kraft technically has not done. Another is that Kittle is faster than Kraft. Another is that Kittle’s team tends to throw the ball more than Kraft’s. Another is that the scheme the 49ers use includes multiple tight ends and a fullback, which highly consolidates the targets among the top couple pass-catchers. Christian Kirk got nicked up right away, Ricky Pearsall is already done for the year, and now Mike Evans is missing practice with a quad issue. Get the picture?
The Bad
Though Kittle does have the edge in some spots on a guy like Kraft, there is one difference here that is likely going to mean just about everything. Tucker Kraft also suffered a serious injury, but his was a knee injury, and he’s already been activated off the PUP list. At 25 years old, we have a bit more trust in his bounce-back ability. George Kittle, at 32 years old, is coming off a more serious Achilles injury. And he remains on the PUP list.
As we highlighted with both Kraft and Kittle, they do not have ideal profiles for fantasy football. They do play inline, and they are asked to block on a good chunk of pass plays. George Kittle has actually only gotten more than 100 targets twice, in his second and third years in the league, meaning he hasn’t gotten 100 targets since 2019. He’s been able to do “more with less” because of his elite athleticism, but if that’s going to be sapped coming off a serious injury, we could be missing the key ingredient to what has made Kittle great.
The Advice
If Kittle was going earlier, we’d be out. Can’t draft a “standalone” tight end who might not be ready Week One. But he comes off the board currently in the TE8-10 range, often outside the top 100 picks. That’s in a range where we can comfortably take two tight ends because we’ve already loaded up on RB and WR.
There are basically three ways you can play it here. If you want to be super safe, you can wait until the ~TE10 range and “double tap” tight end. You can do something like Travis Kelce/George Kittle where you start Kelce early on while you give Kittle time to heal (Kelce has bye week 5, so hopefully that is quick).
That double-tap move takes a lot of draft capital to execute, however. The next safest move is to wait and take someone “safe but boring” like a Dalton Schultz. He goes very late, and you can start him for a couple weeks while we wait for Kittle. The other option is to go Yang-Yang and take ANOTHER high-risk tight end from the Yang list and roll the dice on TWO upside guys. I do like this move from time to time, especially if it’s a league where people are actually open to trading.
Dalton Kincaid, TE, Buffalo Bills
The Good
The bet on Dalton Kincaid has been the same every single year. The guy always dominates the spreadsheets and charts in any sort of “per route run metric”. Yards per route run, targets per route run, touchdowns per route run - you name it. For instance, last year Dalton Kincaid led all tight ends in yards per route run at 2.79, with the second closest being Tucker Kraft at 2.33, per Pro Football Focus. To put that in perspective, only five guys had a yards per route run over 2.
And those aren’t the only stats that are great for him. He runs 75.8% of his routes from a WR spot. He was asked to pass block on less than 1% of his snaps. Despite his limited snaps, he wins vs. man-to-man, brings in contested catches, and gets screens as well. His 15.1% target share is rock solid for a guy with his usage.
So the hypothesis remains the same. What if you took such an efficient player and you let him play more? That same thing happened with guys like Chris Godwin, CeeDee Lamb, and Jaxon Smith-Njigba who started as part-time players then blew up when they got a bigger role. Mark Andrews is a perfect example at tight end as well - he only ran 40% of his team's routes as a second-year player. Maybe this will be the year Dalton Kincaid plays more?
The Bad
The problem with that bet is that we’ve made the bet three years in a row now and it has not hit yet. Despite our fantasy wishes, Kincaid continues to be a part-time player. Last year, in year three of his career, he had ONE game where he played more than 50% of the snaps (that was Week 3 with a 55% snap share). That’s just not going to give us the upside we need.
Injuries certainly have not helped Kincaid and, in the past, GM Brandon Beane has been pretty upfront with his thoughts on that. Here is what Beane had to say about Kincaid after year two regarding his availability.
“Dalton, I would say... Dalton didn’t have the year that he expected, or we expected; nothing for any particular reason I can say other than some durability things — he got nicked up during the season. Dalton’s tough. He’s gonna have to continue to work on his play strength. He’s not as built and muscular as, as let’s just say Dawson is, and so that’s one of the nuances of this game as a young player is — you know in college you don’t play 17 games plus playoffs. So, building your body up to withstand what it takes.
Yeesh. Essentially every year we discuss how Dalton Kincaid is “in the best shape of his life”. And that will help him play more. And then he doesn’t. It’s obviously happening again if you’d like to drink some of the Kool-Aid- here is a clip of Brandon Beane saying that Kincaid looks “chiseled” and that he made him take his shirt off (Beane then refused Kincaid’s request that he take his shirt off).
The other thing we have to take into account here is that all of that happened when the best WRs on the team were guys like Khalil Shakir, Joshua Palmer, and Keon Coleman. Those guys are still there, but the Bills also traded for DJ Moore this offseason. So now Kincaid REALLY needs to be a full-time guy and a top two target on the team, as there really is a number one for the first time since Stefon Diggs.
The Advice
I DO believe that Dalton Kincaid is a good player. I DO believe that he could blow up for fantasy if he gets more snaps. And I DO believe that nagging injuries might have been part of the reason he hasn’t been a full-time player so far. I’m not really worried about guys like Khalil Shakir or Dawson Knox - my only concern is the playing time for Kincaid.
The reality of Kincaid is that he already offers a pretty decent floor even as a part-time player. That makes me more willing to go Yang-Yang with Kincaid as my TE1 and another upside play as my TE2. I think Kincaid is STILL a reliable enough fantasy starting option even as a part-time guy. But his ceiling is much higher if he can take that step forward. The Bills already picked up his fifth-year option, so they believe in the player. There are so many guys that don’t have any sort of high-end ceiling in their range of outcomes at all that we have to give ourselves a shot at upside. I am willing to continue drinking the Dalton Kincaid Kool-Aid.
Kenyon Sadiq, TE, New York Jets
The Good
This section will be a good example of how simple these bets can be sometimes. Kenyon Sadiq is a rookie first-round pick who is inarguably one of the most athletic tight ends of all time. We talk about how important straight-line speed is for tight ends when it comes to chunk plays - Sadiq has literal 100th percentile speed.
If he got drafted to a team like the Bengals with two high-end WRs like Ja'Marr Chase and Tee Higgins, we would probably be out. But he didn’t. The Jets have one high-end pass-catcher in Garrett Wilson. All Sadiq needs to do is beat out guys like Adonai Mitchell and fellow rookie Omar Cooper Jr. for targets. The upside case for Sadiq really is as simple as “super athlete could get the ball a lot”.
The Bad
We gave the simple upside case. Here’s a very simple list of problems.
- Sadiq might not even start right away with Mason Taylor there
- Those WRs might get more targets than Sadiq
- Breece Hall needs targets too
- Geno Smith might be terrible
- The Jets might be terrible
- Sadiq might be terrible
That’s really it. And not all of them need to come true. If Sadiq is pretty good but he’s a part-time player, that might be enough to hold him back from breaking out. Rookie Mark Andrews was pretty good as a part-time player and was unstartable. Trey McBride hardly even played as a rookie, and he’s turned out to be one of the best fantasy tight ends of all time. It happens fairly often at this position. The ceiling might be high, but the floor is super low.
The Advice
With Sadiq, you absolutely need to draft another tight end. And your other tight end needs to be startable Week One and for the foreseeable future, as we literally have no idea if this guy will matter in fantasy at all as a rookie. Or ever. Another first-round tight end, Eric Ebron, got a big opportunity as a rookie and did nothing with it. Ebron basically had one fantasy-relevant season in his whole career with Andrew Luck. Noah Fant is another super athletic first-round pick tight end that didn’t pan out. Evan Engram, a similar size comp to Sadiq, actually had to leave the team that drafted him to find a new scheme to have success.
That said, this is a copycat league. A lot of teams are using an inline tight end with another guy as their “big slot”. That could be Mason Taylor inline with Sadiq at WR. If that’s the case, the targets could be highly consolidated among the top guys. What if Sadiq is just awesome and he’s ripping off big chunk plays with his speed left and right? That’s the kind of upside you are never going to get from, say, Dalton Schultz, who has a similar ADP. So we will gladly take Sadiq as part of a Yin & Yang TE build - ideally when we have bench space to hold onto guys for more than a few weeks.
Chig Okonkwo, TE, Washington Commanders
The Good
We did not like the way Chig Okonkwo was used in Tennessee. In fact, HE did not like the way he was used in Tennessee. Here are his own words from the Next Man Up podcast regarding his time with the Titans and his new situation with the Commanders.
There's so much more I'm able to do. The offensive leaders of this team, the role that they see me playing, I'm just so excited to know I'm going to be a featured guy [in the passing game] from the first week. I can't imagine what my numbers [stats] would look like if I was getting real targets from Week 1, if I was running real routes. I'm excited to show what Chig Okonkwo is supposed to look like on a football field for an entire season."
First off, anytime a player refers to themselves in the third person, we need to move them up half a round in our rankings. In all seriousness, though, we do want guys talking this way about themselves. We want guys who are a top two target on their team. As of the writing of this, Okonkwo could be exactly that behind Terry McLaurin. We want athletic guys - Chig runs a 4.52, which is the same forty time as George Kittle. He, Kittle, and Kyle Pitts are the only tight ends over the last five years to have three plays of 40+ yards in the same season.
Okonkwo’s aDot was low, but that’s largely because he got 21 screens - he and Trey McBride (24) were the only guys to get more than 13. Despite only having a 64.2% route participation, he managed 13 broken tackles, which was top five for the position. He lined up at WR for 60% of his snaps and was rarely asked to pass block. This guy checks all sorts of boxes for what we like to see.
The Bad
There are two major issues here. The first is that, if Chig Okonkwo was so special, why wasn’t he able to carve out a more meaningful role with the Titans? Multiple different regimes came through there and, for the most part, he was relegated to a 60% snap share guy - or worse. And, on the occasions he did see more than 80% of the snaps, he didn’t really flash.
One issue is that, even though Okonkwo has the speed we like, he doesn’t quite have the size. At 6’2”, 243 pounds, he really is a bit of a “tweener”. He isn’t quite big enough to line up and block as a traditional inline tight end which means he needs to be a better option than whatever slot WRs you might have in the pass game. Here is a look at his Relative Athletic Score from RAS.football to give you an idea. A lot of green for speed but a lot of red for size.
And there is one last MAJOR lingering issue. The Washington Commanders still have $43M in cap space. And there are still some wide receiver options floating around. Deebo Samuel recently signed with the 49ers. And Brandon Aiyuk may have shot his own chances in the foot. But guys like Stefon Diggs and Keenan Allen are still lurking out there. Terry McLaurin is almost certainly going to lead this team in targets, so those guys taking snaps and targets from the slot could be a huge problem. Heck, even if rookie Antonio Williams or a vet like Luke McCaffrey or Treylon Burks step up, that could be a problem.
The Advice
As of the initial writing of this, we do have the yellow tape around Okonkwo still. And that’s entirely related to the possibility of them signing another wide receiver. Specifically, Stefon Diggs, who is native to the DC area and has been tied to the team. The tight end position is that fragile, and two guys like McLaurin and Diggs locked into 100+ targets would be a problem for upside.
That said, if we ever get some sort of confirmation that the Commanders are NOT signing anyone, it’s wheels up. I already have no problem taking Chig at ADP in best ball because of his chunk play ability and the potential upside. If we get to the end of August when our big important redraft leagues are scheduled, and Chig is looking free and clear, we will gladly take him at ADP. I really doubt it will shoot up much farther based on “no news” if it hasn’t already.
Greg Dulcich, TE, Miami Dolphins
The Good
Anyone who has followed my work for any amount of time knows two things. One is that, in this range, we don’t care about floor. Only upside. The other is that we are willing to fall for Greg Dulcich in any given season where there is a sliver of light at the end of the tunnel.
Breakouts come at the convergence of three things - talent, scheme, and opportunity. In this case, the talent is still a question mark. We’ll admit that. But the scheme and opportunity are potentially there.
As for scheme, Bobby Slowik comes from the Kyle Shanahan tree, just like Mike McDaniel. That means using a fullback and multiple tight-end sets rather than heavy three-WR sets. Slowik had great success bringing that scheme to the Texans in 2023. Mike McDaniel has run that scheme in MIA for a couple years, where Jonnu Smith and Darren Waller both ran 70% of their routes from a WR spot. Slowik was the pass game coordinator last year, and we expect him to continue that setup this year. That is good for Dulcich.
And it doesn’t take long looking at this depth chart to realize that there is opportunity by default. The Dolphins have more dead cap than active spending this year and had no way to really splurge on WRs. They have incumbent Malik Washington and brought in retreads like Tutu Atwell, Jalen Tolbert, and Terrace Marshall. They had a bunch of picks in the top 100 and used none of them on WRs, opting instead to later take a relatively unknown Caleb Douglas and Chris Bell, who is coming off a torn ACL. Dulcich has been touted as one of the primary targets for new QB Malik Willis in early practices.
The Bad
Even as a Greg Dulcich “truther”, I have to admit that there is a serious question about the talent. He’s not particularly big, and he’s just fast enough to not be considered “slow”. He pretty much faceplanted in both his previous stops in Denver and New York.
The Denver situation was especially disheartening because it was technically two regimes, and the second one, with Sean Payton, would have hypothetically been great for Dulcich. And he did get a shot in the “Joker” role where he actually got eight targets in Week Two. He then proceeded to drop three of them and was essentially buried under Sean Payton’s doghouse.
So the downside is basically that Greg Dulcich might not be good and Malik Willis might not be good and the Dolphins might not be good. Which, come to think of it, sounds pretty bad.
The Advice
Believe it or not, I can excuse pretty much all of that bad stuff. Why? Because we are talking about the TE25 in ADP here. I could not care about the floor one bit. This guy is going in undrafted territory and, if he doesn’t hit, we just drop him - just like every other player with an ADP outside pick ~175 (seriously, even on FFPC, which is tight end premium, he goes around pick ~150, which is outside the top 12 rounds.
When it comes to the tight end position, opportunity is king. I watched Gary Barnidge blow doors off on a terrible Browns team. I watched a converted quarterback, Logan Thomas, come out and have a TE3 season. If this was TE6 off the board or something, we would debate whether or not it was “worth it”. Having any path to upside at all in this range is worth a shot. And maybe Greg Dulcich is more talented than we think - he was quietly elite in one key stat on his fairly small sample size.
YANG HONORABLE MENTIONS
Oronde Gadsden/David Njoku, TE, Los Angeles Chargers - If they did not sign David Njoku, we would have been quite interested in Oronde Gadsden because of everything we wrote in the Greg Dulcich section about this scheme. But there are early reports of Charlie Kolas as the inline TE with David Njoku as the pass-down TE, with Gadsden potentially doesn’t he depth chart. That’s simply too much for a team that has Ladd McConkey and Quentin Johnston.
Eli Stowers, TE Philadelphia Eagles - We technically could paint a similar picture to Kenyon Sadiq here. DeVonta Smith is Garrett Wilson here. Let’s say Dallas Goedert is the inline tight end, like Mason Taylor hypothetically is. And then we have a battle of Eli Stowers vs. Makai Lemon for targets just like Kenyon Sadiq vs. Omar Cooper Jr. Sadiq went before Stowers, Lemon went before Cooper, and Goedert is more entrenched than Taylor, but you get the vision, right?
AJ Barner/Elijah Arroyo, TE, Seattle Seahawks - We would have had AJ Barner in our Fades Article if he was actually being drafted in a spot that mattered. Yes, there isn’t a clear top 2 target on the team. But Barner is painfully slow, and his profile as a guy that runs ~85% of his routes from an inline spot and blocks on 16.8% of his pass plays has a virtual 0% high upside hit rate. If Elijah Arroyo plays at all as the “big slot” tight end, that seriously caps the upside on Barner and actually makes Arroyo the guy we are quietly more interested in in terms of upside. Which is nice because he goes undrafted in virtually every format.
Terrance Ferguson, TE, Los Angeles Rams - We plan to do an additional article on “contingent upside picks,” which will cover Terrance Ferguson in depth. But the short and sweet is that we like this kid - he’s a pseudo WR who can run high-aDOT routes from all over the formation. He probably needs an injury to either Puka Nacua or Davante Adams to maximize upside, but when Adams did go down last year, he ran 37 routes in the next game, which was tied with Colby Parkinson behind only Nacua.
Example Yin & Yang Tight End Drafts
I know this article is already long, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to wrap it up with a couple quick examples of what a Yin & Yang TE draft looks like using our Mock Draft Simulator. That way you might be able to just copy this type of draft in your leagues, if you like the looks of it.
Here is how the draft went based on a 1 QB, 2 RB, 3 WR, 1 TE, 1 FLEX, 1 K, 1 DST, 6 BENCH PPR league with some quick thoughts on the build.
Quarterback - We got an elite option in Jalen Hurts, so we are all set there; we need need for more.
Running Back - Jonathan Taylor and Breece Hall are in our two RB spots with high draft capital. We completed the room with an upside play (Bhayshul Tuten), a “safe” play (Jordan Mason), and a handcuff plus (Isiah Pacheco)
Wide Receiver - Drake London and Tee Higgins should be in our lineup all year. We managed to get a safe play in Michael Pittman, so we decided to play things risky with THREE rookie wide receivers in Carnell Tate, KC Concepcion, and Omar Cooper Jr trying to hit a home run. Yin & Yang TE helps give us the room to do that.
Tight End - As we discussed above, Travis Kelce offers a solid floor. He has an early bye week; we might not necessarily be able to trust someone like Kenyon Saqid by Week 5 (think about Colston Loveland last year). So we opted for Chig Okonkwo as our Yang tight end, who faces the Giants during Kelce’s bye week in Week Five.