Yin & Yang Tight Ends: 2024 Yin Yang TE Fantasy Football Draft Strategy

The Tight End Wars have been raging on for years. And we won some key battles last year against two major factions. Factions that have been put down for good. Guys like Sam LaPorta and Dalton Kincaid finished what Kyle Pitts started against the “never draft rookie tight ends” crowd. And the “Travis Kelce, then who cares” battalion will finally have to start “caring”. But those are merely battles on the fantasy front.

We’ve certainly lost troops to the most cowardly of groups: the “remove the TE position entirely” platoon. And I certainly get that some casual gamers want to make their leagues easier – it’s much simpler to just draft fantasy RBs and WRs. So, feel free to go with those settings if you are playing with your great grandparents or anyone under 10. The rest of us will continue playing on “hard mode” with all the positions that they use in high-stakes leagues. But there’s not much you can do about folks who are scared and choose to retreat.

This article here, however, has been our biggest battle. Facing off against our greatest opponents. The “you should only ever draft one tight end” army. And, despite our victories on the battlefield year after year, there are still some who have not yet embraced Yin & Yang Tight End. So, the fight goes on.

Fantasy Football TE 2024: What Is Yin & Yang Tight End?

I’m glad you asked, soldier. First, here is where we are on our path to glory:

• Our article What Makes An Elite Tight End is basically boot camp – your basic training on the traits we are looking for.
   
• Your sharpshooter course is the 2024 Elite Tight Ends. Those are the best bets if you want to snipe a tight end early.
   
• I’m not sure if you have figured it out or not yet, but I’m not super familiar with military stuff. You know the part of the movies where they have to run up a big hill and get yelled at a bunch but then later on it turns out that they learned an important lesson along the way that saves their life? That’s the article on Tight Ends You Should Be Fading.
   
• And, finally, we have arrived on the front lines. Deep in the trenches of the later rounds. That’s where we unleash our super weapon: Yin & Yang TE.

Yin & Yang Fantasy Tight End is actually fairly simple. If you missed out on the elite guys, we wait and we draft two – our Yin tight end and our Yang tight end. 

Yin Tight Ends - 2024 Fantasy Football

This is a “safe” option that you can trust to start early in the season. They have a reasonable floor but there is something preventing them from truly having difference-making upside (for instance, maybe they are low on the target pecking order on their own team or maybe they simply aren’t super athletic).

Yang Tight Ends - 2024 Fantasy Football

This is the highest risk, highest reward player possible. The problem? Well, due to their risk, it may be hard to trust them Week 1 as your starter. In hindsight, we like to think we’d have the stones to draft guys like Mark Andrews, Darren Waller, Dalton Schultz, etc. in their breakout years then plug them in Week 1, but no one was really doing that. 

A lot of these guys don’t even break out right away anyway, so it’s not even worth starting them. But we know they are out there because, for seven straight years now, a tight end has come from outside the top 17 in ADP to finish top five:

This Is Not Just A Fantasy Draft Strategy; It’s A Lifestyle

Yin & Yang TE doesn’t often end with the draft. No, that’s really just the beginning. Much like Zero RB, it’s not easy to just identify the league-winning, late round tight ends in the draft and nail it. You often need to hit the waiver wire – HARD. If you punt running back, you are dedicating a chunk of your bench to RB upside. Same goes for tight end.

Lucky for you, I update these rankings every single week along the way. And, in many cases, the tight ends that inevitably start for you in the playoffs don’t emerge until the season rolls on. Trey McBride wasn’t even starting for his own team until Zach Ertz got hurt in Week 7. Over the remainder of the season, he had the second most targets of any tight end behind only Yin & Yang Fantasy TE Medal of Honor recipient Evan Engram – who had the second most targets by an NFL tight end of all time.

In fact, let’s say you didn’t draft Sam LaPorta or David Njoku (or add them off waivers). You didn’t have Kincaid either. And then you missed out on Trey McBride as well. You STILL had another option that became available in Isaiah Likely. He not only was the cover of our Week 12 Yin & Yang article, but I posted a breakdown with a video of why I was not scared to plug him right into fantasy lineups. 

If you are paying attention to the right details, these guys are out there. And we’re here to help you find them. I can’t promise that you’ll win, or even that you’ll get that fantasy breakout, but I can promise you that I will do everything in my power to help find them. And find them before anyone else.

A Very Super Mega Brief 2024 Fantasy Draft Strategy Recap

This article is already long, so here’s a very super mega brief recap of the first three articles:

• If you can get a good value on one of Sam LaPorta, Travis Kelce, Mark Andrews, Dalton Kincaid, Trey McBride, Kyle Pitts or Evan Engram, then good. Do that. Explanations are here on why we like these guys at the right price.
   
• We aren’t drafting much of George Kittle, David Njoku, T.J. Hockenson or Dallas Goedert at current fantasy ADP because they’re a little expensive for what they offer. Explanations are here.
   
• We are never drafting Dalton Schultz or Cole Kmet, not even if there is a fire. Explanations are here.

Okay, good, let’s get into Yin & Yang Tight End.

2024 Yin Fantasy Tight Ends (Medium Floor, Medium Ceiling)

Sometimes, in war and fantasy football, you just need someone to hold down the fort until the cavalry arrives. These are those fellas. They might not be flashy or have the high upside, but they can fend off attacks while we search for the big guns. And who knows – guys from this group have exceeded expectations and jumped into the Standalone tier (like Evan Engram last year). So, pick your best option, then we use a bench spot on a league winner.

We’ll go through all the options now (obviously with bigger write-ups with The Good, The Bad and The Advice for the guys that weren’t covered in previous articles). Remember – the goal is to use the Yin tight end as a placeholder while we look for this year’s breakout (like Sam LaPorta or Trey McBride), then we start the Yang for fantasy playoffs. Ideally, we aren’t carrying two all year. If things break right, you might even be able to trade one…

Evan Engram

Full write-up here. He offers a great floor in full PPR but perhaps not the highest ceiling. In most cases, if I take Engram, I’m probably not taking a second tight end. But in leagues with only 8-10 teams and deeper benches, you can probably afford to draft the TE8 at ADP then use a bench spot on an upside play. 

George Kittle

Full write-up here. Anyone who has had George Kittle knows his boom/bust nature. Plugging him into the lineup always feels pretty good, but it can be a coin flip as to whether you get the results you want. I don’t draft much of Kittle outside of best ball, but he is capable of monster games at any moment. He’s a unicorn.

Jake Ferguson

The Good

We have yet to write up Fergalicious in the series, so here we go. Some folks might be surprised to see Jake Ferguson on the Yin side of the formula here. Because he DOES have a path to being a top two target on his team – the number one indicator of tight end upside. In fact, he was a top two target on the team last year with 102 targets, which was behind only CeeDee Lamb. And it was actually 21 more than Brandin Cooks, so it’s not like it was particularly close either.

Ferguson was pretty solid in a lot of metrics that we look for. He was top 10 among qualified tight ends in target share and route participation. He only blocked on 5.3% of his pass plays, which is nice. He also lined up at wide receiver for 53.5% of his routes which isn’t world-beating by any means, but it’s more than half.

He was well above average in another key stat: success vs. man-to-man. His 21 receptions vs. man coverage tied Sam LaPorta and T.J. Hockenson for the league lead and was actually one more than Travis Kelce. He also broke 17 tackles which tied Travis Kelce for second behind David Njoku. He finished as the TE9 in fantasy which, given his TE25 ADP, you have to be pleased with.

The Bad

With a guy like Jake Ferguson, you’re probably going to have to settle with “pleased”. Because the problem with his upside isn’t really the opportunity – it’s the athletic ability. Let’s take a little look at his profile per PlayerProfiler:

There is a reason his picture is “Turd Ferguson”, which I absolutely had nothing to do with (okay, maybe I might have said something once on their podcast). When you consider all the clunky blocking tight ends in the database, a 4.81 40-yard dash is SLOW. 

Sure, he broke some tackles, but that didn’t really mean he was ripping off big plays. The longest play in his career is a single play of exactly 40 yards. Per my data, if he has another 40+ yard play at any point, he will be the only tight end over the last seven years to run a 4.8 or slower and have two such plays. There’s simply no escapability at that speed.

Let’s look at a couple of seasons where much faster guys got a similar number of touches:

It’s just an element of his game that is simply not present. And when you really boil the whole profile down, you’ve got an unimpressive athlete running low aDot routes and not breaking off big plays with them. And, sure, he was the second target on the team, but with CeeDee Lamb getting 181 targets, his target share was only 15.6%, which doesn’t really move the needle. 

The Advice

We’ve seen these types of guys before. Mediocre athletes that get a bunch of targets based on scheme and opportunity. And they can pop at times. Austin Hooper on the Falcons. Dalton Schultz on this very Cowboys team. With enough targets, the job can get done. 

I mean, Zach Ertz who ran a 4.74 forty was able to have a single 1,000-yard season in his career. He needed 156 targets to do it, but he got there. Ferguson, to us, is exactly boring and that’s what makes him a decent pick for this fantasy football draft strategy. If they went out and got another high-end wide receiver in free agency or the draft, we would fade him into the ground. 

But they didn’t. So, he’s actually kind of safe. He’s like a much less athletic Evan Engram in that sense. But, based on our composite ADP, he goes around 20 picks later than Engram. So, if you wait til most of your league takes a TE, you can grab Ferguson. Just make sure you circle back to stash someone with higher upside. Ferguson is the quintessential Yin, but we need that Yang.

Dallas Goedert

Full write-up here. He’s the clear third fiddle on the team so he’s more of a “handcuff plus” that only has elite upside with an injury. But an injury to either WR would do it, so more of a double handcuff plus. Goedert has the very first bye week in Week 5, so you’ll need another TE fairly quickly anyway.

Luke Musgrave

The Good

In most instances, we would be pretty fired up about Luke Musgrave. How often does a rookie tight end even win the starting job, let alone come out and have games of 6, 7 and 8 targets? And that 8-target game came in his third-ever NFL game. Pretty rad. Rookie Dalton Kincaid was a TE1 in fantasy and even HE gets forgotten about because of how good Sam LaPorta’s rookie year was. A rookie tight end finishing TE1 pretty much fried our brains.

Now, we know that Musgrave got hurt but, before that happened, he was the starting tight end for the Packers and the primary pass-catching tight end. In fact, he was virtually the only pass-catching tight end, as Tucker Kraft only got two targets over the first eight weeks of the season. 

The coaching staff says that they plan to use more two tight end sets, but that means using Tucker Kraft inline as a blocking tight end with the better pass catcher, Musgrave, split out wide. Those formations would actually be a GOOD thing for Musgrave since it likely takes a WR out of the game. That’s assuming Tucker Kraft recovers quickly from the torn pectoral muscle that has him currently on the PUP list.

We would like to see better usage for Musgrave in terms of snaps, alignment, etc., but, when he was out there, he was getting targets. Musgrave was on pace for a respectable 76 targets as a rookie before his season was ended by an abdominal injury.  A highly athletic player in an ascending offense with an uncertain target totem pole is usually just what we look for.

The Bad

It’s really not Tucker Kraft that concerns me all that much. The modern tight end room has different varieties of tight ends and Musgrave is the better pass catcher than Kraft. It’s the OTHER pass catchers that are the concern here.

We want our tight end playing as many wide receiver snaps as possible – typically out of the slot. Not only do the Packers have a great slot WR in Jayden Reed, they don’t even have enough snaps for all their great wide receivers. The Packers say they want to run more two tight end sets, but that would mean two wide receiver sets. Where are they going to find snaps for Christian Watson, Jayden Reed, Romeo Doubs, Dontayvion Wicks, Luke Musgrave and Tucker Kraft?

This is what happens when a team hits on ALL their NFL Draft picks. This actually might end up being a big rotation where NO ONE really plays 90%+ of the snaps. Last year, Romeo Doubs played 77.1% of the snaps and no one other WR or TE played more than ~57%. These guys could all be great dynasty fantasy assets where none of them really hit their ceilings until contracts and cap hits start breaking up the band. 

The Advice

This is exactly how we get those backend TE1, front end TE2 types. We’ve got a talented player. He earns targets when he’s in the game. But he’s not quite the focal point of the offense as of now. And even an injury to one of the wide receivers doesn’t necessarily move him up that pecking order. To a certain degree, he’s stuck.

But he is in an ascending explosive offense. With Tucker Kraft coming off the torn pec, it should not be difficult for him to defend his starting role as the pass-catching tight end. And that should give him an okay weekly floor. If you wait until every team in your league has a tight end then go Yin & Yang, you could do worse than Luke Musgrave starting for you early. Especially in deep leagues. In REALLY deep leagues, we have some options as well.

2024 Fantasy Yin TE Options - Really Deep Leagues

Cade Otton

Last year, Cade Otton was the third target behind Mike Evans and Chris Godwin. He had a couple of good games there when Chris Godwin was dealing with the neck issue midseason. And he especially looked good when Godwin was dealing with the knee in the playoffs. 

Overall though, he led all tight ends in routes run and finished as the TE19. So, not super inspiring. The idea is that he could be a Dallas Goedert-lite that has some standalone value with upside if someone gets hurt, but the addition of Jalen McMillan in the draft pours some cold water on that. 

Mike Gesicki

We don’t even know if he will be the starter, let alone have a full-time role. That makes it hard to lean on him as a Yin. If he does have a full-time role, he could be playing a lot of slot with Tyler Boyd gone. But Ja'Marr Chase and Tee Higgins are still there. So, even then his upside is limited.

Dalton Schultz

Full write-up here. He’s the clear starting tight end. But they now have three high-level wide receivers ahead of him in the pecking order. He’s now likely 2 injuries away from high-end upside.

Tyler Conklin

Tyler Conklin isn’t particularly big at 6’3” and he’s not fast, running a 4.8-40. The top targets on the team are probably Garrett Wilson, Breece Hall and Mike Williams. But it’s also Aaron Rodgers who does whatever he wants, so I’m sure Tyler Conklin will score a touchdown here or there or even have a two-TD game at some point. 

He’s not someone I want to depend on, but Mike Williams has not been the healthiest guy and he’s starting the season on the PUP, so you could do worse in the first couple weeks of 2024.

Jonnu Smith

The Dolphins run essentially the same offense as the 49ers. They have Jaylen Waddle and Tyreek Hill as their Deebo Samuel and Brandon Aiyuk. Terron Armstead is Trent Williams. Alec Ingold is Kyle Juszczyk. And now, Jonnu Smith will attempt to be their George Kittle. 

Durham Smythe is destined to be more of a blocking TE and Jonnu has the athleticism to break off chunk plays. But it’s hard to trust Kittle from week-to-week, so it will be even harder to trust Jonnu. The Dolphins ran ZERO tight end screens last year, so we have to imagine that number increases with Jonnu. Right?

Colby Parkinson

If you look at the thought process with Dallas Goedert and Cade Otton, it can also be applied to Parkinson. They have two WRs that are clearly ahead of him. But an injury to either wide receiver could unlock some upside for Parkinson. 

The difference is that Parkinson isn’t guaranteed to win that starting job – or keep it. But he’s in the driver's seat early in the season until Tyler Higbee gets back. And that’s all we need for Yin & Yang tight end. To keep things afloat early.

Chigoziem Okonkwo

We had high hopes for Chig with his athleticism. But he couldn’t connect on his big play attempts last year. And now they have added Calvin Ridley and Tyler Boyd to go along with DeAndre Hopkins. That certainly caps the upside for Chig.   

Noah Fant

This mysterious tweet I sent three weeks ago? This was about Noah Fant.

Yes, Colby Parkinson and Will Dissly are gone. But they still have DK Metcalf, Tyler Lockett and Jaxon Smith-Njigba. How many injuries away from being a top two target on the team is Fant still?

2024 Yang Fantasy Tight Ends (Low Floor, High Ceiling)

Look, I know you guys. And I know myself. I’m drafting at least one Yang-Yang team. Have to earn that #YangYangGang badge with at least one team. Just know that not everyone is going to hit Mark Andrews or Darren Waller or Sam LaPorta on their first try. You might need to duke it out on waivers for a bit. In the year Logan Thomas finished TE3, he was TE26 through six weeks. Last year, Trey McBride was unstartable for the first seven weeks. Isaiah Likely obviously didn’t start until the last six games. 

The whole point of Yin & Yang TE is to give ourselves some sort of safety early on so we don’t bleed too many losses. Can’t win the championship if you don’t make it. But that upside is just too darn tantalizing. So, I get it.

In this section, we are throwing caution to the wind. The floor does not matter – only the ceiling. This is the cavalry that arrives in the nick of time to win the war. These are the heroes. Though, as always, some of them will undoubtedly be zeroes. 

Kyle Pitts

Full write-up here. This is a good player. I’ve seen him have a 1,000+-yard season with the shell of Matt Ryan. Is his knee okay? I don’t know. Is Kirk Cousins’s Achilles okay? I don’t know. Is this new offense good for Pitts? I don’t know. 

But Pitts is worth the risk to me at his ADP. And, for many, he’s too expensive to pair with another player. But, in shallower leagues with deep benches, you MIGHT want to tack on some safety with another TE.

Brock Bowers

The Good

There is a reason that you’ve heard nothing but good things about Brock Bowers. He’s been nothing but good. He was a highly-touted prospect out of high school. He immediately succeeded as a freshman with 56 catches for 882 yards and 13 touchdowns receiving. 

And he never stopped succeeding, winning the John Mackey Award for the best tight end in college football TWICE over three years. He even registered FIVE rushing touchdowns, one of which was 75 yards.

Over the last decade, he is the top college tight end per Pro Football Focus in receiving grade, receiving yards, receiving touchdowns, receiving yards after contact and missed forced tackles. At 6’3”, 243 running a 4.52-40 with his vertical leap his best comparable player probably isn’t even a tight end – he’s essentially a stronger Jordy Nelson. He’s a wide receiver that you can start in a TE spot in fantasy. 

The Bad

As we know from our full breakdown What Makes An Elite Tight End, the number one most important caveat for tight end upside is being a top two target on their own team. Last year, every single top 12 tight end in PPR was either first on their team in targets or at least second. And we can’t guarantee that for Bowers.

Unless he is traded or injured, Davante Adams will lead the Raiders in targets. That isn’t up for debate. The FEWEST targets Davante Adams has gotten over the last three years is 169. Last year he was second in the league with 175. So, you can pencil him in for an absurd amount again, almost certainly.

So, the path for Brock Bowers is that he first needs to NOT split snaps with incumbent tight end Michael Mayer. Then, he needs to out-target veteran wide receiver Jakobi Meyers. Who, despite missing a game last year, was solid as ever registering 71 catches on 106 targets. If the targets are even split here, that’s going to cap the upside of Bowers because of what a black hole sun Davante Adams is. Not to mention, with Gardner Minshew or Aiden O’Connell at the helm, we don’t know the quality level of these targets.

The Advice

Just go back and read The Good again. This fella is a certified stud muffin. I’d bet on him going up against Jakobi Meyers any day of the week. I expect Michael Mayer to be the inline tight end with Bowers essentially playing wide receiver for this team, which is actually the ideal configuration – so don’t worry about Micahel Mayer.

The problem here is that we kind of blew up our own spot when we told everyone that it’s okay to draft rookie tight ends under the right circumstances. So now, Bowers actually gets drafted in the TE1 range at TE11 on average and sometimes well before that. We still probably need some safety so it might be kind of expensive in terms of capital to draft Bowers then circle back for a Yin (or another Yang). We’ll take Bowers if we get a good value, but I don’t find myself reaching early in drafts.

David Njoku

Full write-up here. We already talked about how we don’t really love the ADP for Njoku right now – check that link for the full details. If you think Deshaun Watson will change his tendencies or that Jerry Jeudy will completely faceplant, Njoku could once again be a top-two target on the team. 

Or maybe Amari Cooper will hold out the whole season? Who knows. But the path to upside for Njoku is once again there if things pan out so he’s in this column. If it looks like Amari and Jeudy are clearly ahead of him in the pecking order, he will quickly move to the Yin side.

Pat Freiermuth

The Good

Pat Freiermuth is a good football player. I rarely ever hear anyone say “Pat Freiermuth sucks”. His SITUATION has been bad. But he’s a good player. You put any good tight end in a Matt Canada offense alongside target hog Diontae Johnson with Kenny “Cat Hands” Pickett bumbling things up and they’re going to struggle. But all that is over now. 

Over the last four years, Diontae Johnson has commanded around 9 targets a game. NINE. That’s a lot of junk thrown his way considering he only cracked 1,000 yards one time. Now, he’s with the Carolina Panthers. George Pickens will get a bump but A. He doesn’t profile as a massive target hog and B. He already got 106 targets last year. You can pile on a bunch and there’s still a lot to go around. And it’s Pat Freiermuth vs. Van Jefferson, Calvin Austin and a third round rookie in Roman Wilson. I like those odds.

It’s easy to forget that the Pittsburgh Steelers were a playoff team last year. And, no matter how you slice it, Russell Wilson is the best passer the Steelers have had since Big Ben retired. We actually already did a full breakdown in section two of our The Muth vs. The Myths article on why Russell Wilson wasn’t really that bad last year and is actually great for Pat Freiermuth. That article has all sorts of Muth goodness in it, so we’re not going to recap the whole thing here – consider it the “director’s cut” of our Pat Freiermuth’s The Good section.

The Bad

In that The Muth vs. The Myths article, we covered a lot of the bad. But there is still a chance that things are bad. For instance:

• Russell Wilson did throw 26 TDs and only 8 picks, but he also only threw for 3,070 yards. He hasn’t thrown for over 4,000 since 2020.
   
• Wilson also hasn’t had a fantasy-relevant tight end since Jimmy Graham. Again, we addressed this in that Muth Myths article, but it’s a fact.
   
• Wilson could be benched for Justin Fields which would be even worse in terms of target quality.
   
• Arthur Smith is calling the plays. Arthur. Smith.
   
• Roman Wilson could turn out to be awesome. And then Freiermuth is the third fiddle.
   
• Pat Freiermuth isn’t super athletic himself, so he NEEDS those targets. A lot of them.
   
• The Steelers could just flat-out suck in a division that is very good.

The Advice 

People love to make jokes about Arthur. And that’s because it’s fun – I just made fun of him like two seconds ago. But his offense last year did throw the ball 173 times to the tight ends and 90 of those went to Kyle Pitts (which is the same number of targets that George Kittle got). I’m not at all worried about extra offensive lineman Darnell Washington or third-string TE Connor Heyward. Muth has a huge opportunity here.

That’s why, despite us having Pat Freiermuth in our Tight Ends to Fade article last year, we are IN this year at ADP.  Based on our composite ADP, he’s going off the board at TE14. You don’t need to pay the premium that you did in past years for The Freiertruck. In fact, you can let every team in your league draft a tight end and then take Muth. That’s the right price for us. 

T.J. Hockenson

Full write-up here. We explained in full why we don’t really like taking Hockenson at ADP. The short and sweet is that he’s coming off a serious injury, he’s returning to a huge QB downgrade and he’s competing with Justin Jefferson, Jordan Addison and Aaron Jones for targets. You can draft Hock if you think he gets more targets than Addison, but he’s not getting more than Jefferson. And you might need to stash him for a bit to see how he even looks coming off the knee.

Hunter Henry

The Good

Hunter Henry is another one of our sweet darling angels that already got a full write-up this year. Again, take a moment to check out the director’s cut on that one, but here is the abridged version.

Hunter Henry has always been very good vs. man-to-man. That’s what has made him so good in the red zone where it’s all lockdown coverage. Despite the team only throwing 16 TD passes, the Hunter got in the Hen House 6 times. We are expecting a QB upgrade this year one way or another.

The Patriots also called zero tight end screens last year. Not one. Alex Van Pelt’s Browns called the second most of any team. David Njoku himself got 20. That’s 20 free receptions. AVP is the new Patriots OC. The Patriots do not have a wide receiver that we would deem a “star”, let alone two. So that path to targets and upside is there. Again, there’s more in his full article, but that’s the movie trailer.

The Bad

We made you a promise that we would cover The Good and The Bad. The Director’s Cut for Hunter Henry above focuses primarily on the good. But there is a lot of potential bad lurking.

First off, the QB play might not drastically improve. We are talking about rookie Drake Maye and Jacoby Brissett here, not Kirk Cousins or Aaron Rodgers coming in. Not to mention, there’s no guarantee that Hunter Henry gets more targets than those wide receivers on the team. He could be third or fourth when all is said and done.

And my guy NEEDS those targets. Because he doesn’t have that breakaway speed. His best comparable players are guys like Pat Freiermuth or Zach Ertz. And we already mentioned that the great Zach Ertz needed 156 targets to have his only ever 1,000+-yard season. Alex Van Pelt threw a lot of screens to David Njoku, but there’s no guarantee he throws them to Hunter Henry given their different profiles. Maybe they even use rookie Jaheim Bell for screens.

The Advice

Again, we do not care one bit about floor. Not at TE18 in ADP. Who cares? Your bench is for taking shots on upside. If Hunter Henry is a focal point of this new offense then great, we did it. If not, we just toss him back for the next upside play. No hard feelings. That’s just Yin & Yang Tight End baby. 

In a normal 10-12 team league, Hunter Henry is probably going undrafted. On RT Sports he goes pick 177 right now which is round 15, when people are typically taking DST and kicker. For me, I’m willing to use a very late pick on this fella just to take a peek.

2024 Fantasy Yang TE Options - Really Deep Leagues

Greg Dulcich

Greg Dulcich probably deserves a full write-up, but we are already over the 5,000-word mark and this guy’s ADP is legit like a billion (228 on RT Sports). Actually, you know what, screw it, I’m writing a bunch about Greg Dulcich right now, I don’t even care. 

Greg Dulcich last year was the starting tight end and played half his snaps at wide receiver while getting two targets on the first three drives. Then he got hurt and missed virtually the entire season. But they did have a role for him. A nice one. One we’ve seen Jimmy Graham play for Sean Payton as a hybrid tight end/wide receiver. Remember how much fun that was? For a couple drives, we saw Dulcich out there – 13 snaps at WR, 8 inline.

And, down the stretch, Lucas Krull took over that role and actually ran more routes than Adam Trautman over the last eight games. So the role still exists. With Jerry Jeudy gone, there is room for someone to emerge as the second target on this team behind Courtland Sutton. In deeper leagues, I’m using my last pick on Greg Dulcich and, if Lucas Krull gets the job, I’ll just drop Dulcich for Krull. In one insanely deep league that we already drafted, I used two VERY late picks on Dulcich AND Krull and I’ll just drop whoever doesn’t get the job. So there.

Lucas Krull

See the rant above.

Juwan Johnson

We like tight ends who line up at WR often, so we’d naturally gravitate towards players like Johnson, who was a WR that converted to TE. The new system Klint Kubiak is bringing over from San Francisco utilizes a fullback which can highly consolidate targets among the other pass catchers. Unfortunately, Johnson suffered an offseason injury to his foot that required surgery and might not be ready for Week 1.

Hayden Hurst

Keenan Allen is gone. Mike Williams is gone. Austin Ekeler is gone. Gerald Everett is gone. Greg Roman’s offense has already produced a top five tight end season OF ALL TIME from Mark Andrews. And reports are that Hayden Hurst is not only in the driver’s seat for that top pass-catching tight end gig, but that he was actually a focal point of the offense, even catching seven passes in one practice (six from Herbert). 

It’s entirely possible he has a resurgence here. If it’s not Hayden Hurst, we have to mention our guy Stone Cole Smart. He played QB in high school, converted to WR then converted to TE. You might remember him from his random 50-yard touchdown last year. He checks every meme box and he’s a dark horse if it’s not Hurst. We are not interested in Donald Parham or Will Dissly; too clunky. Will Dissly ran a 4.87 BEFORE tearing his ACL, tearing his Achilles, and suffering a broken leg that Pete Carroll described as “one he had never seen before”. If he's the starting TE, it just means the Chargers are one of many teams that don't have a fantasy-relevant tight end.

Theo Johnson/Daniel Bellinger

I like the idea of Theo Johnson getting the pass-catching gig here given his athleticism. He has one of the highest RAS scores for a tight end of all time. But it might be the incumbent Bellinger that starts. Either way, with that ragtag group of WRs, there is room for upside. Both these tight ends are probably going undrafted, so we’ll just tell you in our Week 1 Yin & Yang update who you need to add, if you need to add someone. 

Zach Ertz/Ben Sinnott

Zach Ertz was getting 6.5 targets per game the last time he was in Kliff Kingsbury’s offense. Before he got hurt last year, he was on pace for over 100 targets. And, after he got hurt, Trey McBride took off. If Zach Ertz is the new “launch pad” for elite tight ends, we have to keep an eye on rookie Ben Sinnott, who was the second tight end drafted this year after Brock Bowers.

Jelani Woods

We like Josh Downs to be the second target after Michael Pittman. Some like Adonai Mitchell. But guess what? No one knows for sure. Maybe Jelani Woods can take over that gig and be top two on the team. If he's third, he could even settle in to the Yin side. But he's an athletic specimen and a realitive unknown after missing all of last year so keep your eye on Woods.

2024 Fantasy Football Yin Yang Tight End Rankings

2024 Fantasy Football: Related Draft Guide Articles

Explore our selection of other 2024 fantasy football draft guide articles to find more tips and advice to help you get ready for the upcoming season:

• Fantasy Football TE Rankings
• NFL Target Chart
• Fantasy Football Sleepers
• Fantasy Mock Draft