MUST Own QBs & TEs

MUST Own QBs & TEs

 

Tight Ends

Mark Andrews - Baltimore Ravens

I think we can all agree that Mark Andrews was pretty good last year.

TE2 in standard leagues, 0.8 points away from being a top-3 TE in 0.5 ppr.

I need to show you guys something. And I debated not showing you guys because, I feel like some of you guys might have a heart attack. And I'm not sure if I could be charged with murder, or manslaughter or something but fuck it we got make sure all the dogs is eatin even the dead ones

Mark Andrews played on 41.4% of the team's snaps last year.  DAWG!!!!! 41.4%!!!! and the dude was the TE4 in fantasy. 

I get it, he scored 10 touchdowns on 64 catches - but if he becomes even close to a full-time player, getting near the play time that the Kelce's and Kittle's get - there's no reason he can't live in the same opportunity zone they do, seeing 120-135 targets/year, and I mean this year. 

His only competition for targets is Hollywood, and while y'all know i love Hollywood, we've never seen him do it, and he's an outside guy, Andrews down the seam and in the endzone. Hayden Hurst who played on 42% of the snaps and ran over 200 routes as well last year - Andrews only ran 295, is gone too, he was basically their #2 pass-catching TE. So while Boyle and whoever played more, to run-block, they weren't the pass-catchers.

Someone tweeted replying to one of my previous tweets and said "could be a decrease in efficiency and increase in volume type situation" and I said that's exactly what it's going to be - but that presents major upside for Andrews, because we know for sure only one of those is happening - the part about the volume, that's going up - if the volume skyrockets and he stays even 75% as efficient as he was last year - he's going to absolutely crush. I say this often, NFl is a 16-game sample size folks, people trying to predict which was efficiency is going to move in a sample that small, are fooling themselves. Andrews could keep this pace up, it could dip a bit - but i'll bet on the talent, the good coaching staff that I think will do the right thing with Andrews, Hurst being gone, I mean - no-brainer for me on Andrews being one of, if not the single best pick at TE in drafts this year.

Darren Waller - Las Vegas Raiders

Waller is my favorite pick this year, by far at the tight end position, only because everyone is so far off of him. I can't wait until he's being picke with Kittle, Kelce and Andrews next year.

 

Why are people making this so hard? What more do you want to see from a guy to believe he’s good at football?

  • His 1,145 receiving yards in his first year as a starter were 18 yards shy of Zach Ertz’s career-high.
  • His 40-yard dash time is 0.04 seconds slow than Evan Engram’s while having 20+ pounds on him.
  • He played a full 16 games in 2019, something Hunter Henry has never done, while commanding 40 more targets than Henry ever has.

Waller wasn’t simply a volume play. His three touchdowns make you feel like he was only fed targets, which led to his explosion of a 2019 year, but that’s simply not true. He ran a route on the fourth highest rate (76.3%) of all NFL tight ends, had the 2nd most yards after catch (565, 4.9/target), 2nd in yards per target (9.8), 6th in yards/reception (12.6), 3rd in yards/route run (2.87), the single highest contested catch rate (57.9%) among tight ends. The list goes on. And Waller is cozily atop most of them. 

Waller is what people think Mike Gesicki is, but isn’t. If you take Mike Gesicki and make him good at football, you get Darren Waller. Elite athleticism, plus on field production, explosiveness, yards after the catch, it’s all there.

This is an offense that should continue taking steps forward in the passing game coming into their third season in Gruden’s offense.

 

A rising tide my friends, a rising tide.

Waller’s touchdown total of three is concerning, but touchdowns come and go. He led the team in redzone targets last year, so it’s not like he was phased out of the game plan near paydirt. Remember when Travis Kelce couldn’t score touchdowns either? 5, 5, 4 in his first the years playing in Arrowhead.

bUt HuNtEr ReNfroW. Renfrow had three big games last year. Week 8 (4-88-1), Week 16 (7-107-1) and Week 17 (6-102-1). In Week 8, Waller saw 8 targets and scored a touchdown. In Week 16, he had a bad game (4-4-37), against a Chargers team that was rather stifling against TEs, letting up a whopping 3-24-0 line to Travis Kelce in the following week. In Week 17, Waller posted a 10-6-107 line. Do I want my starting fantasy tight end to have more competition for targets? Obviously fucking not. But I’ll continue to yell about this: commanding targets is a skill – and Waller is nothing if not filled to the top of his body with skill.

Derek Carr is one of the more criminally underrated fantasy picks at QB this year and Waller is going to be the main beneficiary to that fantasy success.

In conclusion, Waller is likely the only tight end I’m targeting anywhere before Round 8 in 2020.

 

Jared Cook - New Orleans Saints

Jared Cook is going EASILY going to be the most under-the-radar fantasy TE this year. I have him as high as TE7 in my rankings, so I would be legitimately comfortable starting him in my TE spot in 2020. I haven’t heard a word about Cook this offseason. It’s as if he didn’t finish as fantasy’s TE7 last year in only 14 games?

Cook started his 2019 campaign off slowly, so most fantasy gamers dropped his ass like a cheating hoorah and forgot all about him. Well, he didn’t forget about y’all. Cook started to heat up a month into the season dropping 6-4-41-1 and 3-3-37-1 lines in Weeks 5 & 6 before injuring his ankle and being sidelined through Week 10. 

But mane, when Cook got byke on the field in Week 10 – he was a weekly set-and-forget for savvy fantasy players. From Week 5-17, Jared Cook scored double-digit fantasy points in 9-of-10 games including 18.9, 19.4 and 21.9-point games over that span. Here are Cooks’ numbers with vs. without Drew Brees under center in 2019:

Sure, we all kinda like Adam Trautman, but there’s no such thing as TE competition from a rookie gtfoh. Emmanuel Sanders does give more competition to Cook than he had previously, but Cook was an absolute problem for defenses in the endzone. Cook set career-highs in both touchdowns (9) and yards per reception (16.4) – we want explosive plays and touchdowns from our tight end, Cook will provide both.

Hopes for Jared Cook coming into his 2nd year in this offense couldn’t be higher. He might be old, but the Saints dgaf. This article gives great context behind Cook’s slow start in 2019. He dealt with an undisclosed injury at the end of the pre-season into the regular season, Brees breaks his shit in Week 3 and when Brees finally returns, it was all systems go. I think what we saw down the stretch last year from Cook is much closer to what we’ll see in 2020 than what we saw at the beginning of 2019.

I just don't understand what more you're looking for in the TE equation, objectively. A big play guy (YPR leader), a RZ threat, in a great offense, with a great accurate QB. I don't know man. Like what are we talking about here?

 

Chris Herndon - New York Jets

 

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