Tight End Draft Strategies To Gain An Edge In 2025 Fantasy Football Leagues

Countless draft strategies can help you gain a huge edge, and with tight ends, one of the most volatile positions with the least amount of elite options available, finding a consistent option can sometimes be a chore if you don’t spend high draft capital. The debate between early vs late TE draft strategy for fantasy football in 2025 rages on, with just using the draft capital to draft a tight end, not worrying about finding one during the season. 

Which is the optimal TE draft strategy for fantasy football in 2025? We’re going to get into some of the fantasy football TE tips across the tight end rankings in 2025 to help decipher just which one to use, plus deliver the pros and cons and the best options for each. 

Should You Draft An Elite TE Early in Fantasy Football?

Absolutely. Drafting an elite tight end can separate your roster from many others because there’s only a finite number of elite options every season. For 2025, the consensus top tight ends are Brock Bowers, Trey McBride, and George Kittle. The advantage those three can provide you against the rest of the tight ends is pretty substantial. Structurally, drafting early vs late TE draft option means you likely aren’t drafting another tight end unless you want one for a bye week. Otherwise, you can survive one week of production on their bye week and know you’re getting production well ahead of most of your league mates. Of course, there’s having to choose an elite tight end or elite producers at other positions, too. That opportunity cost is a pivotal decision you need to weigh properly.

Last season, the trio of Kittle (16.6 FPPG from Week 1-17), Bowers (15.5), and McBride (15.4) were almost 2.5 PPR fantasy points per game better than the next two, which were Jonnu Smith (12.7) and Travis Kelce (12.2). I will admit that I’m slightly biased because I love drafting the top three tight ends this season, especially Bowers. When you can get a player that profiles the same or sometimes even better than the wide receivers in the first round, and you can get a wide receiver like a Nico Collins or Brian Thomas, then come back into the second round to draft Bowers or McBride in the third round, it’s a win-win.

These are the tight ends that stack favorably with your favorite early-round wide receivers. Bowers earned the sixth-most targets across all pass-catchers, had the third-most yards after the catch, and put up a robust 26-percent target share across three terrible quarterbacks in Vegas.  McBride earned almost 140 targets, had a top-five first-read route rate (32.3%) regardless of position, and was third among tight ends with a robust 2.12 yards per route run. Kittle continued his massively efficient run in 2024 with a 2.62 yards per route run – the fourth-highest mark by any pass-catcher last season, plus 1,106 yards on a massive 12.0 yards per target, and the 12th-highest YAC of any pass-catcher. There’s a reason why these players are drafted so highly. It costs draft capital, but it’s the TE draft strategy for fantasy football in 2025 that gives you bankable production.

Finding Mid-Tier Value Tight Ends in 2025

Mid-tier tight ends have been tough to draft as they have been for several seasons. You’re clearly not getting the full upside in most cases from the elite tier, but the opportunity cost is much less than the elite tier. I’d say this is the worst place to draft a tight end, because the buy-in to draft these tight ends is still pretty high, but there’s huge downside risk to them, where if they crater for whatever reason, you’ve dug yourself a big hole to climb out of.

The mid-tier tight ends this season are a polarizing bunch of older veterans, a few young guys looking to jump up a tier (or two) into the elite tier, and a podcaster. There’s truly something for everybody if you’re looking to shop for a tight end in this tier. Can Tucker Kraft earn a bigger market share in Green Bay’s ambiguous pass-catching group? What about Tyler Warren with the Daniel Jones and the Colts? I’m legally not allowed to say a cross word about Evan Engram or Andrew Cooper will have my head on a stick.

Whether it’s Travis Kelce’s target earnings maintaining the status quo we’re used to over the years, to Mark Andrews holding on to relevancy on an uber-efficient Ravens team. Let’s also not forget David Njoku, who now gets Joe Flacco as the Browns’ starting quarterback. Since becoming a full-time starter at tight end for Cleveland, Njoku has averaged 1.5 more targets, almost a full reception, 28 more receiving yards, and double the touchdown rate with Flacco in a seven-game sample versus any other quarterback he’s had in that three-season span. The mid-tier TE draft strategy for fantasy football in 2025 is polarizing as it feels like feast or famine, but depending on whether you can get one to fall or not in your draft, you can reap some benefits and potentially hit on a tight end you can keep in your lineup the entire season.

Late-Round TE Streaming Strategies

I went in-depth about late-round tight ends in this article and how late-round tight ends can win you your fantasy leagues. In that article, I also detailed some late-round tight end options plus some sleepers. If you’re drafting other positions and want to wait until the later rounds to grab your tight end, I would suggest grabbing two in redraft leagues and three to four options in best ball leagues. 

The Yin/Yang Tight End draft strategy is your bread and butter here in terms of strategies for late-round tight ends. There are a ton of floor and ceiling options to pair together to create an early-season points floor with a huge ceiling late with your upside option. Pair a Hunter Henry-type with an upside play like Elijah Arroyo makes a ton of sense. Same with pairings like Zach Ertz and Brenton Strange. Colston Loveland and Chig Okonkwo. The options are almost endless here, but the early vs late TE draft strategy debate never stops. Especially when you can pluck league-winning options, considering that in 13 consecutive seasons, at least one tight end with an ADP of TE18 or later has finished as a top-five fantasy option.

How TE Scoring Impacts Draft Plans

ALWAYS check your league settings. Those scoring settings for tight ends could have increased tight-end scoring to level the playing field a bit, which will boost tight-end scoring further. Sites like the FFPC famously feature tight-end premium scoring, which gives 1.5 points per reception by a tight end rather than just 1.0 points per reception that running backs and wide receivers get.

If your league plays some sort of tight-end premium scoring, you’ll want to boost up tight ends in terms of when you draft them. For example, the typical average draft position has Brock Bowers as a mid-second round pick, but on FFPC’s ADP, they have Bowers as a top-five pick. I would take him at 1.01 if I had the opportunity. Trey McBride is also a late-first-round pick, and George Kittle is currently being drafted at the end of the second round into the third round.

That said, not every tight end reaps the benefits of tight end premium scoring. While Bowers, McBride, and to a lesser extent, David Njoku, Travis Kelce, and Evan Engram thrive in tight end premium with massive target-earning potential, options like Mark Andrews, Tucker Kraft, and Mike Gesicki likely won’t gain much of the benefit as their counterparts due to their lack of consistent high-end target-earning ability. If you’re able to find some low-end, late-round options that could get into some target volume like Chig Okonkwo, Brenton Strange, Zach Ertz, or Harold Fannin, then those are bets to make in a tight end premium format. The best part about those lower-end options at tight end is that they do not go very much higher, if at all, than where they normally fall in a typical non-premium scoring format.