Last year, I did a study just before the NFL season started on tight end breakouts. It was part of my preseason tight end primer, and I mentioned I wanted to return to this subject later, likely after the season, to look at it in more depth than I could previously.

And that’s exactly what we’re going to do today. I have to admit, it was a bit of a challenge. I had gathered the data in a way that made sense to me at the time, but, like an idiot, I didn’t write down the exact process I used to get there. Looking back at the sheet, I had the data, and the data was good, but things were a bit messy, and adding new data onto that sheet was just not going to go all that well. I couldn’t remember how I had organized everything after all. I guess that’s what happens when a regular Joe tries his hand at crazy data analysis: sometimes you make mistakes.

Why am I telling you this? To be accountable and vulnerable to you all. I very much enjoy data analysis and strive to learn and streamline my process each and every year. But sometimes mistakes can happen! Anyway, I have new data now, and I actually wrote down how I need to treat the sheet in the following years so I can continue to do studies like this in the future without having to redo all of this work!

For this updated study, I used the great tools over at Stathead and pulled a list of every tight end drafted in the NFL since 2017 who played at least 8 games in any particular season. I could include UDFA’s, but I’ll be honest, there are a couple of UDFA breakouts at tight end, but they are so few and far between, and the process to get that extra data into this dataset would be quite a bit of work. Yes, I know, I just said nothing worth doing is easy, but a man has to draw the line at some point. This still gives us a nice sample of 116 tight ends to pull from.

Next, I need to define what a breakout is. For the purposes of this study, I defined it as the first year a given tight end hits at least 10.5 PPR PPG. That’s roughly Top-10 to Top-8 in a lot of years. If I went up much more, given the state of the position, we’d be talking about a very limited sample of breakouts, but go down much more, we have almost too many. 10.5 PPG is fairly achievable while still being rare enough to be notable.

There have been 115 tight ends who were drafted and played at least 8 games in any given season since 2017. Of those 116, 21 fit our breakout criteria. What does the data tell us about these tight ends? Let’s dive in.

First off, let's look at two different aspects of breakouts. First, what year of their career that they broke out, and then what round they were drafted in.

We’ve seen a year one breakout in three consecutive years between the likes of Sam LaPorta in 2023, Brock Bowers in 2024, and Tyler Warren and Harold Fannin in 2025. Colston Loveland narrowly missed the cutoff with 10.3 PPG. The last tight end with a year-one breakout before LaPorta was Evan Engram all the way back in 2017.

15 of 21 breakouts occurred from Year 1 to Year 3. Another three were in Year 4. As you would expect, tight ends don’t often break out later in their careers. You pretty much are what you will always be by the time you are in the NFL for a few years. But sometimes things just line up perfectly for a big season late in one’s career (Jonnu Smith 2024, anyone?).

Next, we notice by draft capital, Round 1 reigns supreme. Rounds 2 and 3 both have five tight ends apiece. In all, 18 of 21 breakouts were drafted on Day 1 or 2. The only breakouts drafted on Day 3 are Dalton Schultz, Jake Ferguson, and George Kittle.

🔎 How long does it take for Round 1, 2, and 3 tight ends to break out? I’m glad you asked! Round 3 tight ends break out, on average, about 3.4 years into their careers. Round 2, it’s 2.6. Funny enough, Round 1 tight ends take 2.8 years to break out, but let’s look at that a little closer. That 2.8 number is heavily influenced by David Njoku and Kyle Pitts not reaching 10.5 PPG until year 5+ (despite getting close earlier on in their careers). If you take them out, their average drops to 1.6 years until a breakout.

If you do the same for Round 3 and take out Jonnu Smith’s late breakout, the average years of a career it takes for R3 tight ends to break out is 2.3. In general, there is not much difference in the time it takes for a Round 2 or Round 3 tight end to break out. You’re looking at right around 2-3 years.

And that leads me to an interesting find about those first two-ish years. Of the 16 non-rookie tight end breakouts, 13 of them scored at least 7.1 PPG in at least one of their first two seasons. Zooming out a little to the position as a whole, among non-2025 players (since they have only played a single season), there have been 23 total tight ends who have hit the 7.1 PPG mark in one of their first two seasons. In other words, 56% of non-rookie tight ends who hit a 7.1 PPG threshold in at least one of their first two seasons break out. 📈

And while not exactly related, 14 of our 16 non-rookies scored at least 6.7 PPG the year before they broke out. However, 22 non-breakout tight ends have hit that mark in a given season, so it’s not as strong a predictor, but it’s still worth considering.

Those stats are not the same. The first is talking about early career production, the second is pre-breakout production, regardless of when a player broke out. However, in many cases, those stats do overlap, such as with George Kittle, TJ Hockenson, Mark Andrews, and Dallas Goedert.

But what are these two stats telling us? They are saying that if a player didn’t break out as a rookie, we need to be looking for some history of production. Did they get a hit 7.1+ PPG in one of their first two seasons? That’s a strong indicator of a potential breakout. Did they also hit 6.7+ PPG in the most recent season? Even better. 👍

Let’s apply this knowledge to some real-life examples, shall we?

So we know most of the tight ends who break out for fantasy usually do so within their first three seasons. We also know that among non-rookies, there's a 56% chance of a breakout if you hit 7.1 PPG in one of your first two NFL seasons, and hopefully, you hit 6.7 PPG the year before as well, just as an added bonus. Who are some tight ends we can look at as potential breakouts heading into 2026?

First off, the layup. Colston Loveland is an absolute monster as a rookie. I have a feeling he’s going to be just fine. He got to nearly 10.5 PPG as a rookie despite playing with Rome Odunze, DJ Moore, Luther Burden, and Cole Kmet. He’s going to be a force in 2026. 🐻

Next up, we have some more 2025 rookies, Oronde Gadsden and Mason Taylor. Gadsden hit the 7.1 mark and had some serious flashes, but his tail-off towards the end of the year is cause for concern for sure. 

🛩 Mason Taylor didn’t hit the 7.1 mark we want to see, but he was still solid, scoring 6.8 PPG in 2025. It’s fair to wonder how or if he will ascend in his second season in a bad situation. And let’s not forget that Garrett Wilson missed a lot of time last year, allowing Taylor to get some extra looks.

Those are our potential year two breakouts, but what about year three? Let me introduce you to a couple of 2024 fourth-round NFL draft picks: AJ Barner and Theo Johnson.

Barner is not a name I was very aware of or paying attention to until a friend and newsletter subscriber, with whom I co-manage a devy team, mentioned we should pick up Barner off of waivers. I thought, why not? We had guys we could drop. That move paid dividends multiple times during the season. Barner still hasn’t broken out, but he’s jumped up from 4.6 to 8.7 PPG in his two years. Jaxson Smith-Njigba and Cooper Kupp are still in Seattle, sure. And Barner has Elijah Arroyo to worry about as well. But he’s been a great fit for the team, and they didn’t take him off the field often, playing 77% of the team's offensive snaps last year. I don’t mind taking a swing at Barner in dynasty if you can get him on the cheap.

🔵 Theo is someone I touted with this newsletter in the 2025 preseason, citing his final month of play in 2024 before going down with an injury as a big reason I liked him. I was likely a little hasty in backing him, but I saw moments. I’ve heard about his inability to catch, and I think it’s a bit overblown. His 6.8% drop rate wasn’t great, but Tucker Kraft had the same drop rate, and I don’t hear anyone clowning on him because of it. He was also just a hair worse than Travis Kelce and Brenton Strange, but better than Gadsden and Taylor (who had a 12.3% drop rate!).

🐆 One more name I want to mention is Brenton Strange. He didn’t hit the 7.1 PPG threshold we like to look for, but he was well on his way to a strong season before getting hurt in 2025, averaging 9.8 PPG for the Jaguars. He’s been on the Kyle Pitts diet where he matches his touchdowns scored to how many years he’s been in the league. So, we’re on the watch for four now guys, book it.

That’s going to do it for me today. Thank you all for coming here and reading this very weird and whacky tight end study that I doubt anyone asked for yet hopefully still enjoyed. It’s a bit of a mystery position to me for sure, and there’s still a lot of research yet to be done on the subject. I’ll see you again soon!