Finding sleepers or breakout tight ends can help you win a championship. But even if you don’t, you can still win with steady, reliable starters.
What is equally important is avoiding the busts, or at least the overrated, overvalued ones.
The following are three tight ends who, while they might be good players and bring you some success, you should probably avoid at cost because they won’t bring as good a return on investment.
Jake Ferguson, TE/Dallas Cowboys
Depending on your league’s scoring system, Ferguson had six Top 10 finishes amongst tight ends last year. Which means he had 12 weeks finishing outside of the Top 10, seven of which were outside the Top 20. And yet now he’s being drafted as a TE1? Yeah, no thanks. I appreciate his talent and his target volume inside the red zone. And I was one of the analysts singing his praises after Dalton Schultz left the team a year ago and created a void to be filled. But his ADP is too rich for my blood.
Cole Kmet, TE/Chicago Bears
I really like Kmet and I think he had the opportunity for a solid TE1 season this year, if it wasn’t for all the other pass catchers that the Bears added to their offense. Former WR1s, Keenan Allen and D.J. Moore are both going to eat. Rookie Rome Odunze, a Caleb Williams favorite, is going to be a red zone target. D’Andre Swift was brought in because of his pass-catching chops. And even Gerald Everett, a talented and specifically niche pass catcher at tight end, ought to eat into Kmet’s targets. Kmet is being selected as a high-end TE2 right now. Unless he somehow reaches double digit touchdowns as “the guy” in the red zone, I don’t think he has enough target volume to get any higher than a low-end TE2.
David Njoku, TE/Cleveland Browns
Njoku set career highs last year — his seventh season in the league, which should send up caution flags as it is — but it wasn’t until midway through the season with Joe Flacco as his quarterback when he finally became a reliable weekly starter at the tight end position. With Deshaun Watson back at the helm and Jerry Jeudy added to the receiving corps, I’m not so sure we can trust Njoku as a dependable, every-week starter, and I’m certainly not drafting him as a mid-TE1 starter. If he falls to the later rounds after I’ve built a solid corps of running backs and tight ends, that would be the time for me to take a chance on him.