Elite TE Debate: McBride vs. Bowers

For years, Travis Kelce (and Rob Gronkowski before him) have carried fantasy football teams to victory. But with Kelce likely well past his prime, perhaps the only important question at the TE position in 2025 is: Do you believe Brock Bowers or Trey McBride is capable of replicating his best seasons?

My Dynasty Points co-host Jakob Sanderson is exasperated that the shorthand term of “Elite TEs” has survived into a season where only Bowers and McBride truly have that distinction by ADP. So, although I expect much of this article to remain evergreen in its utility for determining which “Elite TEs” are and aren’t worth an early pick in any future season, I’ve grounded it around Bowers and McBride in particular.

By the end, you’ll have all the information you need on each of them, as well as all of the strategy considerations I’ve used to determine my stance on these players in 2025.

The Case For Trey McBride

First, the elephant in the room: McBride is perhaps the biggest positive TD regression candidate in all of fantasy football. Per our expected TD model, a player with his targets (based on their depth and location) should have scored ~5.8 more receiving TDs than he did in 2024.

This is in large part thanks to McBride commanding the highest first-read target share by a TE in Fantasy Points Data history (33.6%). The same goes for his traditional target share (26.5%). Add in the 2nd-easiest and 2nd-most improved schedule among any TE, and we had no trouble projecting McBride for over a full point per game more than he averaged last year.

But there’s a pretty big problem: the entire fantasy community is already on top of this. McBride’s early ADP on platforms like ESPN suggests you’d have to select him over players like Tee Higgins, Ladd McConkey, and Chase Brown. His price has come down from earlier in the summer on Underdog, but there, you’ll likely still have to take him over Brown and Davante Adams. Even with positive TD regression captured in our projections, we still have all of the players I’ve mentioned above projected to average more fantasy points per game (FPG) than McBride. For some, the gap is as wide as 1.0-2.0 points per game in half PPR formats.

But then again, shouldn’t we put a premium on points that TEs score? After all, points are more scarce at the position, so perhaps having an elite TE leads to more wins than an elite RB or WR would. Let’s investigate.

A Quick Detour Into The History of Early-Round TEs

We can test this hypothesis in several different ways. First, we can look at actual results. ESPN has published the rate at which each player has made the playoffs on their platform. No TE has hit a “league-winning” (>55%) playoff rate while having an ADP inside the top-40 picks since 2017 — except for Travis Kelce. That’s despite seven other unique TEs (many across multiple years) being selected in that range.

Kelce averaged at least 18.0 FPG (or ~15.0 FPG in half-PPR scoring) in three of the four seasons he achieved this feat, posting bona fide top-6 WR numbers. In other words, it is very difficult for TEs to be league-winners at early ADPs unless they outscore the WRs and RBs they are selected around. (As for why that’s our measuring stick, Scott Barrett does an excellent job explaining why league-winning upside is all that matters for managed redraft leagues in this evergreen piece.)

Also, consider that the top of the TE position hasn’t provided much value over replacement in the last decade-and-change without Travis Kelce and Rob Gronkowski. But most importantly, points scored by RBs and WRs lead to just as many Wins Above Replacement (WAR) as those from TEs. In other words, you aren’t any more likely to win a matchup after your TE scored 20 fantasy points than you would be if your WR had scored 20 fantasy points.

This is especially the case in leagues with three lineup slots dedicated to WRs, as this further increases the opportunity cost of selecting a TE over one of them in the early rounds. The below WAR-based graph indicates that in such leagues, you should not draft TEs over any WRs you expect to outscore them, as whichever player scores more (regardless of position) will contribute more wins:

WR scoring becomes a bit less valuable in leagues that only start two of them. But TE scoring remains roughly as valuable (at generating wins pound-for-pound) as RB scoring. If you believe that De’Von Achane, Bucky Irving, or Chase Brown will score more fantasy points than Brock Bowers or Trey McBride (as we project), it does not ever make sense to draft the TE over the RB.

Where does this leave us with McBride? Our projections (with positive TD regression built in) place McBride well below the 18.0 FPG (in PRR) or 15.0 FPG (in half PPR) benchmarks that we established for a “league-winning” season from Travis Kelce. The bar for a TE to return value at this early an ADP is just dizzyingly high; he’d need to run hot on TDs or otherwise be hyper-efficient to make it happen.

The biggest problem with this is that through three NFL seasons, McBride has never shown anything approaching hyper-efficiency. Kelce averaged 0.47 fantasy points per route run (FP/RR) by half PPR scoring in 2022 — the last time he paid off an early ADP. Though he’s an amazing target-earner, McBride has never exceeded 0.37 FP/RR. Just 9.0% of his receptions went for 20+ yards in 2024 (24th of 32 qualifying TEs). Compared to a player like George Kittle, there’s little reason to believe McBride has game-breaking explosiveness.

I’ll get exposure to McBride on Underdog if he falls past his ADP into the flat tier of WRs in the middle of Round 3, but I’ll likely have none in managed redraft if early prices hold.

Can Brock Bowers Overcome This?

From a pure projections standpoint, no. Bowers projects slightly behind McBride for us, despite his ADP being a half to full round earlier on most platforms. That’s largely because we expect the Raiders in 2025 (under Pete Carroll and Chip Kelly, who went against his NFL legacy by calling one of the slowest-paced offenses at Ohio State last year) to be significantly more run-heavy than the version we saw in 2024.

The fantasy environment for the Raiders’ pass-catchers was much better last year than many gave it credit for. The offense generated the 12th-most plays per game (62.6), the 3rd-most dropbacks (705), the 3rd-highest pass rate (66.2%), and the 7th-most catchable targets per game (26.8).

Though this was partially a result of their dreadful defense, it was also from a lack of desire to run the ball with their underwhelming stable of RBs; a metric like Pass Rate Over Expectation (PROE) that controls for game script still had the Raiders among the top-12 most pass-heavy teams (+2.0%). We should expect that to crater after the team selected Ashton Jeanty with the No. 6 overall pick.

Of course, this will be a more efficient offense under Geno Smith than it was under Aidan O’Connell and Gardner Minshew. But if that increased efficiency in a more ball-control style attack prevents the Raiders from falling out of every game, that’s going to come at the cost of reduced volume. No pass-catchers saw more volume in garbage time than Bowers and Jakobi Meyers in 2024.

We’ve even seen Geno Smith and Pete Carroll together for two recent seasons. They resulted in no pass-catcher exceeding 15.0 FPG. I’d rank Bowers above the 2022 version of DK Metcalf in skill, but that offense was highly concentrated and hadn’t just spent the 6th overall pick on an equally generational RB prospect (as much as I adore Kenneth Walker).

In short, I am not drafting Bowers over De’Von Achane, Drake London, or Ladd McConkey, for the same structural reasons that I’m mostly fading McBride. But I’ll be the first to admit that this one is much more likely to blow up in my face.

We’re talking about the player who just averaged the most FPG of any rookie TE since the Vietnam War while setting the rookie receptions record (at all positions). If we remove the four games from Bowers’ rookie season in which 3rd-stringer Desmond Ridder played significant snaps, he’d have averaged 17.3 FPG — within spitting distance of Travis Kelce’s league-winning 18.0 FPG benchmark. Last year, Geno Smith ranked top-5 in accuracy when targeting the middle of the field and 2nd-best in target share to the slot (37.5%). And maybe there’s a world where the Raiders’ dreadful secondary forces them to go incredibly pass-heavy all the same. Betting on Bowers to have a Gronkowski/Kelce-level ascendence is genuinely tempting.

But none of that is quite convincing enough for me to say “screw the projections,” especially with there being so many middle and late-round TEs I love this year. I’m much less comfortable placing a limit on Bowers’ potential to be a hyper-efficient freak than I am with McBride (and I have even hedged via a longshot OPOY bet), but I’m still not going to have much of him in fantasy football this year.

For a few reasons^[1], everything we’ve discussed above applies most cleanly to typical managed redraft leagues. But it’s July, when many of you are likely drafting best ball teams, so let’s shift to that lens.

Best Ball Application

TL;DR: RBs and WRs have more frequent spike weeks than TEs (when their points are measured evenly). And it’s easier to find best ball playoff-winning TEs late in drafts than similar WRs.

In the simplest terms, best ball is about drafting players who post big scores in a lot of individual weeks. I’m not breaking any news by telling you that RBs and WRs generally outscore TEs, but it’s worth noting that 30 RB/WRs have posted more 15.0-Underdog point weeks than the first TE on the list over the past four seasons. RBs and WRs dominate TEs in terms of both weekly floor and weekly ceiling.

When we zoom in on the TE position, the case for Bowers and McBride in 2025 becomes even murkier. Since 2021, here’s the rate at which every TE posted a spike week, with Rob Gronkowski’s final 12-game season included for fun and perspective:

Even if we exclude McBride’s rookie season, in which he didn’t play a full-time role, his spike week rate grows to just 27%. Bowers would need a significant leap forward — which, as we’ve discussed, is nowhere near a guarantee — to get up to Kelce’s or Kittle’s level. And as yet another mark in Kittle’s favor, he easily leads the way in the above metric among non-retired and non-washed players, but goes 20 picks later than McBride.

To go a little deeper, most best ball tournaments on Underdog or DraftKings are decided by a handful of one-week playoff “pods” from Weeks 15-17, making spike weeks within a small sample at the end of the season critically important to advancing and winning money.

Sticking with our 15.0-point benchmark, such a performance reflects a ~96.4th-percentile weekly outcome for a TE over the past four seasons.^[2] In a given playoff week (W15-17) since 2021, about 3.2 TEs have hit that on average. Those TEs are almost certainly helping you advance and/or win a lot of money in Week 17.

Since 2021, these are the “playoff hero” TEs to produce multiple 15.0+ point “spike” weeks during Weeks 15-17 in a single season: Dalton Schultz (2021), Mark Andrews (2021), George Kittle (2022), David Njoku (2023), and Isaiah Likely (2023). That’s it.

Those TEs had positional ADPs of TE33, TE5, TE5, TE9, and TE27, respectively, during the years in question. In other words, the “elite TEs” have largely not been the most advantageous to roster during the best ball playoffs.

The market is understandably bad at projecting who will score the most points across a small handful of weeks at the end of the season — that’s a tough (or maybe impossible) job! Therein lies the problem with drafting a player because he could be “the guy you need” in the playoffs; it’s unlikely any individual player is that guy, and recent history has borne out that early-round TEs are no more likely to be than middle- or late-round ones.

Plus, remember how Rob Gronkowski and Travis Kelce led the way in spike performance rate across all weeks? Neither ever managed to concentrate multiple of them within a given best ball playoffs (going back to 2021 — perhaps one or both would have earlier in their careers). It’s not enough for a TE like Bowers or McBride to progress into a “Gronk or Kelce”-level season; they would also still have to get somewhat lucky to be a playoff hero and stack multiple big performances at the end of the year.

I’ve demonstrated that it’s quite difficult for a TE to be a true needle-mover in the best ball playoffs. But I don’t want to stop there; to be confident about a structural fade of Bowers or McBride in 2025, we’d want to demonstrate that the WRs you could be selecting over them have better odds of moving the needle.

To give TEs the best possible chance in this exercise, let’s even assign a large positional premium to their points by raising our bar for a “spike week” at WR (which likely isn’t even necessary when comparing positions generally, as we demonstrated earlier).

Among WRs, a 96.4th percentile weekly performance comes out to 21.2 Underdog points. Approximately 6.1 WRs have reached this mark in any given best ball playoff week over the past four seasons.

That’s nearly double the number of TEs to hit a “spike week,” but when we remember that you must fill three WR lineup slots compared to only one TE slot, that means it’s been harder for any given WR slot to hit a spike week in the playoffs. But does that mean it’s been harder to draft those players?

The “playoff hero” WRs who have nailed multiple spike weeks in a given best ball playoff are: Amon-Ra St. Brown (2021), Brian Thomas (2024), CeeDee Lamb (2023), Davante Adams (2021), DeVonta Smith (2024), Jameson Williams (2024), Justin Jefferson (2022), and Mike Evans (2024). That’s two rookies, five WRs who were going within the first three rounds of ADP, and Jameson Williams.

Unlike at TE, the majority of playoff-winning WRs required a premium pick to be invested in them. Despite it still being difficult, the market has been much better at identifying WRs who will perform well in the best ball playoffs compared to TEs.

We’re only working with a four-year sample, and any particular future year could have more playoff heroes at TE or fewer playoff heroes at WR, with their ADPs distributed differently. But it makes intuitive sense to me that it’s easier to find playoff heroes late in drafts at TE, and I do believe this is generally applicable to future seasons. A needle-moving week at the TE position requires a pair of touchdowns and not much else. Plenty of TEs are capable of lucking into that over a small sample.

But a WR needs significant target volume and TD efficiency to stand out. All of the WRs capable of doing that are drafted in the early rounds, and it’s been much harder to replicate the impact of an elite WR than that of an elite TE by taking three shots at the position later in drafts. Therefore, you should generally draft WRs early in best ball instead of TEs.

Graham Barfield found something similar in his best ball strategy deep dive last offseason. From his article, “The overwhelming majority of tight ends that provide the most leverage during the regular season are drafted in the late rounds. Over the last three years, 20 of the top-26 TEs by regular season advance rate were drafted at 135 overall or later. That’s 77%.” The massive opportunity cost of an early TE – the WR you could have drafted instead – is an even larger deterrent, given this context.

I’ll readily admit one final time that a lot of what I’ve written here could be moot if Brock Bowers defies the bounds of mathematics and goes on the greatest run since Rob Gronkowski. But working in the realm of what’s most likely, I’ll be significantly underweight on the two early TEs in best ball this year.