I'll play devil's advocate:FantasyFreak wrote: ↑Sun Oct 10, 2021 12:52 am Posted this in the injury thread. I actually dragged up the Kitltle thread last week, made a post about how he's not in the elite TE tier any more, and the sell window is closing fast. I made a long paragraph about it, then deleted it, for some reason. Still feel that way, and it may be too late. I traded him everywhere this off season. He's not getting targeted like Kelce or Waller, has a murky situation with QB's, gets hurt too often, and his HC/OC just doesn't feature him. He's in the tier of everybody else below Kelce and Waller, with Andrews, Hock etc. That's the truth. I saw this coming all off season, and got out. Hope others did too.
Didn't want to be negative, I think, that's why I deleted my post, but it would have definitely been apt at this point. When Kittle gets back off IR, if you can play any sort of trade to a contender, at the time, to get his value from the off season, do it. He's just not an elite asset at all. He's a falling knife in value. Get out if you can get anything close to elite value.
- Kittle is 85-95% of what Gronk is as a career trajectory right now: Extremely productive when healthy, but plays such a fearless and physical style of ball, that he misses games. This could be good or bad, depending on what you look for, but Kittle is still an elite TE asset. I'd argue that he's a buy right now, because at bare minimum, I'm getting someone who has the upside to have big games.
- Waller in his last 3 games has less targets than Kittle. Kittle and Waller have both been beneficiaries of teams who had middling WRs, so they were targeted more often. As those pieces have improved, they have been targeted less. Worth considering before touting targets as a reason to bail. It's difficult for TEs to sustain a role as the #1 option, because it would require them being better than the WRs who run more routes and are the primary reads most of the time. This is probably a better reason to sell in redraft.
- Either way, Kittle is averaging 7 targets a game, which isn't nothing. Only Hockenson (7.5), Kelce (8), and Waller (10) average more. And Waller's is bloated by a 19 target game.
- I would disagree that Kittle isn't featured. He's 2nd on the team in targets and nobody after that is particularly close. Because of his value as an elite blocker, they aren't going to send him out on passing routes on every single dropback. He doesn't need to be the #1 guy to be "featured."
Kittle is still an elite TE asset, because the position is still a wasteland of uncertainty. Dalton Schultz is currently a Top-5 TE in points right now and more useful than OJ Howard, Evan Engram, David Njoku, and the other TEs in that class who were supposed to change that position.
I'd love to buy Kittle, but I'd be hesitant to sell, because the upside is still there and the position is extremely shallow.
