Loading...
We use cookies for analytics and advertising to keep TheFantasyPicks free. These run by default; you can opt out anytime with Reject or via Cookie Settings. See our Privacy Policy.
Sponsored affiliate link.
Player photos courtesy of ESPN.
Ranking moves, risers and fallers, and new posts. Free, no spam, unsubscribe anytime.
The tight ends going off the board first for their safety are not the ones with the highest boom rates. Several tight ends going 70 to 90 picks later actually post better spike-week numbers, by a real margin, all measured on full 2025 seasons in half-PPR scoring.
Trey McBride sits at 18th overall in our model, the top tight end on the board, but his boom rate is just 5.88 percent, the lowest number in this entire piece. Brock Bowers ranks 24th with a healthier 23.53 percent boom rate, but his 12.76 ceiling score is also the lowest here. Both are being drafted as the safe, early tight end pick, and the numbers back that up: McBride in particular is a floor play wearing a TE1 price tag, not a spike-week weapon.
| Player | TFP Rank | Consensus Rank | Boom % | Bust % | Ceiling |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| George Kittle (TE, SF) | 87 | 90 | 23.53 | 17.65 | 15.36 |
| Dallas Goedert (TE, PHI) | 93 | 99 | 23.53 | 29.41 | 15.66 |
| Travis Kelce (TE, KC) | 94 | 101 | 29.41 | 17.65 | 17.02 |
| Dalton Kincaid (TE, BUF) | 106 | 114 | 29.41 | 29.41 | 17.16 |
Every one of these four posts a higher boom rate than McBride, the actual TE1, and three of the four have a higher ceiling than Bowers too. All four carry a real gap over their own consensus rank as well, six to eight spots each, which means the field is pricing them behind where the numbers say they belong on top of everything else.
Travis Kelce's ranking has fallen to 94th overall, tight end WR6-ish territory rather than a locked top-5 pick, but his 29.41 percent boom rate ties for the best of any tight end in this piece, and his 17.02 ceiling leads the group. The rank drop is real. So is the fact that when a target-heavy veteran tight end does hit, he still hits harder than most of the field drafting ahead of him at the position.
Dalton Kincaid's 29.41 percent boom rate matches Kelce's, but his 29.41 percent bust rate is also the highest of the four, an exact coin flip between a spike week and a dud. That variance is exactly what a best ball roster is built to absorb. At a price nearly identical to Kelce's, Kincaid is the higher-risk, structurally-similar-reward version of the same bet.
George Kittle and Dallas Goedert both post the same 23.53 percent boom rate, short of Kelce and Kincaid but still well ahead of the tight ends going earlier. Kittle's 17.65 percent bust rate is the lowest of the four, making him the steadiest of this group. Goedert's 29.41 percent bust rate is the highest, closer to Kincaid's shape than Kittle's. Between the two, Kittle is the floor pick, Goedert the higher-variance one, at almost identical draft prices.
If you take a tight end early, know exactly what you are buying: McBride and Bowers are floor and role security, not boom rate, and that is a legitimate reason to draft either one. If you wait, the real spike-week upside at the position is not gone by pick 90, it is sitting right there in Kittle, Goedert, Kelce, and Kincaid, all four outperforming the field's own price on them. The best ball tool sorts every tight end by boom, bust, and ceiling if you want to dig past these six, and the rankings page shows the full board across every format. Scoring rules for boom and bust weeks are documented at NFL.com's fantasy scoring reference.
Don't pay the early price for tight end safety without checking whether it's actually the safe pick, or just the popular one.
