Pat Fitzmaurice has gone position-by-position to provide you with fantasy football draft strategy and advice. Here’s how Fitz is preparing for his fantasy football drafts. His primers include fantasy football draft strategy, targets, rankings, tiers, and more.
Here are each of Fitz’s complete Fantasy Football Draft Primers: QB | RB | WR | TE
Below we dive into some of his fantasy football draft strategy and advice for Tight Ends.
- Fantasy Football Draft Kit
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- 2025 Best Ball Fantasy Football Draft Kit
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Fantasy Football Draft Strategy: Tight Ends
Let’s explore some fantasy football draft strategy and advice from Pat Fitzmaruice for each position.
Tight Ends
Rookies have led all tight ends in fantasy scoring the last two years. First, it was the Lions’ Sam LaPorta in 2023, then the Raiders’ Brock Bowers in 2024. Kelce hasn’t hung ’em up yet — he just had 97 catches last year in his age-35 season — but Bowers looks like the new standard bearer at the TE position.
Trey McBride is coming off an 111-catch season and is only 25. LaPorta’s second NFL season wasn’t quite as successful as his first, but he still finished TE7 in half-point PPR fantasy scoring.
Two tight ends were selected in the top half of the first round in this year’s NFL Draft. The Bears took Michigan’s Colston Loveland 10th overall, and the Colts took Penn State’s Tyler Warren 14th overall.
The Packers’ Tucker Kraft is another promising young tight end. And we’re still lighting prayer candles in hopes that Dalton Kincaid and Kyle Pitts will start living up to their early-career hype.
Mix the young tight ends with the quality veterans — Kelce, Pitts, Andrews and perhaps a handful of others — and suddenly the TE position looks pretty fertile relative to years past.
Tight end is now a buyer’s market, giving fantasy managers a number of different ways to attack the position. There’s solid value at a variety of price points.
Want to spend up for Bowers, McBride or Kittle? I think you can justify it.
Would you prefer to wait a bit and grab LaPorta, Kelce or T.J. Hockenson? OK, cool.
Wait even longer and try to get value on Andrews, Evan Engram or David Njoku? Sounds good.
Or punt the position until the double-digit rounds and gamble on Kincaid, Pitts or some other bargain-basement tight end? Hey, as long as you’re building advantages at other positions in the early rounds, go for it.
I’m not wedded to a single approach to the TE position in my 2025 drafts, but I’m more amenable to drafting a tight end in the early rounds than I used to be. That said, there will be at least a few drafts in which I punt the position and go dumpster-diving in the later rounds.
Tier 1
Trey McBride’s 147 targets were the second-most among tight ends and the eighth-most among all pass catchers. A second-year leap for WR Marvin Harrison Jr. could nick McBride’s target volume, but the Cardinals added no significant pass catchers in the offseason. Despite drawing 20 red-zone targets last season, McBride scored two TDs. If he can improve his touchdown luck, he could challenge for an overall TE1 finish.
Tier 2
After a sensational rookie year, Sam LaPorta had a slight dip in production in 2024. LaPorta actually improved year over year in yards per catch (12.1) and yards per target (8.7), but after averaging 7.1 targets per game in 2023, he averaged only 5.2 targets per game in 2024.
Five games into the 2024 season, Mark Andrews was TE32 in fantasy points per game and hadn’t scored a touchdown. From Week 6 on, Andrews scored 11 touchdowns in 12 games and averaged 3.8 catches and 46.1 yards per contest. A downturn in target volume and yardage suggests that Andrews’ days as an elite fantasy TE may be over, but he remains an important cog in the Baltimore offense and a solid fantasy option.
After an injury-marred 2024 season in which he lost eight games to hamstring and shoulder ailments, Evan Engram could be poised for a rebound fantasy season in 2025. Broncos head coach Sean Payton has said he plans to make Engram the “joker” in his offense. That’s been a key role in Payton’s offenses over the years, filled by players such as Jimmy Graham, Reggie Bush and Alvin Kamara.
Check out Fitz’s full Tight End Fantasy Football Draft Primer 
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