While Cleveland Brown fans feel pretty great about Austin Hooper resetting the tight end market with a reported annual salary of $10 million, there’s at least one person in Cleveland who is less thrilled with the move. With Hooper now onboard, it’s clear that David Njoku will be relegated to either a backup role or being the lesser half of 2TE sets.
Giving up on David Njoku and overpaying Austin Hooper is something I believe the Browns will grow to regret. When you compare the two players, Njoku is a more explosive athlete who is more likely to give you splash plays, and he’s much more of a vertical threat than Hooper. But on an offense that already has Odell Beckham Jr., perhaps the Browns felt they need less splash and more consistency, which is something that Hooper has provided over the past three seasons.
Though Hooper and Njoku’s skill-sets are different, I’d like you to ponder their 2018 seasons. Njoku set a career-high with 88 targets during that season, as did Hooper (at the time) with 88 targets as well. Hooper did a much better job catching the ball, hauling in 71 of his targets (80.7% catch rate) and turning those receptions into 660 yards and four touchdowns. Njoku only converted 63.6% of his targets into receptions (56), but he nearly matched Hooper’s yardage total, on 15 fewer receptions, with 639 receiving yards, and he matched Hooper’s four touchdowns.
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David Njoku is a Pass in Redraft
No matter when you like to draft tight ends, early or late, you shouldn’t have Njoku on your radar unless you’re playing in a 2TE league. Regardless of how much Browns’ head coach Kevin Stefanski likes to run two 2TE sets, there aren’t targets to go around to make Njoku a viable fantasy asset if he remains in Cleveland in 2020.
On an offense that employs Beckham Jr., Nick Chubb, Jarvis Landry, Austin Hooper, and Kareem Hunt, there just aren’t enough plays to include the backup tight end consistently in the game plan. If your flavor of fantasy is strictly redraft, then you shouldn’t even be thinking about Njoku this year.
Dynasty: Buy, Buy, Buy
Though not a target for redraft leagues, Njoku should be on your radar in all of your dynasty or keeper leagues. In his most recent “Dynasty Trade Value Chart,” Mike Tagliere pegged Njoku’s trade value as a back-end rookie first-rounder. Though that price is a bit rich for me, I have a strong suspicion that his cost has dropped dramatically with the Hooper signing. During your ongoing or upcoming rookie drafts, you can likely acquire him for a late-second or early-third rounder in non-tight end premium leagues.
What the Browns failed to realize, and what many dynasty owners don’t have the stomach for, is that tight ends historically take years to break out in the NFL (and fantasy). Tight ends that break out in the first or second season, like Evan Engram and George Kittle, are not the norm. Typically it takes tight ends several seasons to fully blossom in the NFL. Players like Zach Ertz, Jared Cook, Delanie Walker, or even Austin Hooper needed three to four years and multiple teams in some cases before they became fantasy darlings.
In his last healthy season playing under a more competent coaching staff than the Freddie Kitchen’s clown show (yes, I’m saying the Hue Jackson era was better), Njoku finished as the TE11 among tight ends who played at least 10 games in 2018. Hooper finished as the TE9 scoring 10.1 points per game compared to Njoku’s 9.5 per game. During the 2018 season, he put his 80th percentile speed and field-stretching ability on display ranking seventh at the tight end position in air yards with 780. Excluding Jimmy Graham, every tight end in the league that had more air yards than Njoku had at least 13 more targets. With his speed, burst, and leaping ability, he is still a weapon that is a match-up nightmare for any defense that attempts to cover him with a linebacker.
Unlike the Browns, I’m not ready to give up on a tight end entering his age 24 season after one down year. If the Browns don’t cut or trade Njoku prior to the 2020 season, he’ll hold little value this coming season. You should still buy every last share of him that you can get your hands on. His rookie contract expires after the season, and with the money the Browns just invested into Hooper, it’s safe to assume that Njoku will hit the free-agent market in 2021. The 2018 season gave you a glimpse of Njoku’s upside. He ranked second on the Browns in receiving yards despite seeing a middling 16.9% target share, per playerprofiler.com. If he were to land on offense that features the tight end evenly slightly more than that, he has top-10 upside at the position.
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Shane Manila is a featured writer at FantasyPros. For more from Shane, check out his archive and follow him @ShaneIsTheWorst.