The Tight End Crown Is Cursed And You Keep Paying Full Price For It

We have not seen a tight end finish as the position's top fantasy scorer in consecutive seasons since Travis Kelce did it from 2018 through 2020. That is five straight years of a different man wearing the crown. Five.

Now, I am a suspicious person by trade and by upbringing, so let me say plainly that five years is not a law of physics. It is a sample. But it is a sample that keeps producing the same result, and in my experience when something keeps happening you should stop calling it a coincidence and start calling it a pattern with better manners.

Why The Crown Keeps Moving

The reason is not mystical. It is structural, and it is the same three things every time.

• Touchdown variance. Tight end scoring is more touchdown-dependent than any other position outside of kicker. Touchdowns do not repeat. They regress, cheerfully, into the people who paid up for them.
• Target competition arrives. A tight end has a monster year, the team notices, and then the team goes and gets a receiver. Success is punished with company.
• The offense changes underneath him. Coordinators leave. Head coaches get fired. The scheme that produced eight red zone looks becomes the scheme that produces four.

Which brings me to Trey McBride, who wore the crown in 2025, and who is now entering the first year of the Mike LaFleur era in Arizona.

The Browns taught me never to confuse a possibility with a plan. Year one of a new offense is a possibility.

I want to be fair to the man. McBride is genuinely excellent, and there is a real argument that he is the safest pick in his tier because the target volume has been earned rather than gifted. Some very sharp people have him first and they are not being foolish.

But you are being asked to pay last year's price for a player whose play-caller, route distribution and red zone usage are all being rewritten by a man who has never run this offense in this building. That is not a knock on McBride. That is a knock on the information. You are buying a 2025 stat line and receiving a 2026 offense.

So What Do You Actually Do

Two things, and neither of them is clever.

One. If you are going to pay up at tight end, pay up for the one whose situation is not changing. Volume attached to a stable offense is the entire ballgame. Chief will tell you Brock Bowers, and Chief is a Raiders fan, and I have spent eleven years learning to discount everything that man says about Las Vegas. He is still right. The targets are real and the offense is not being rebuilt around a new voice.

Two. If you are not paying up, do not stand in the middle. The middle of the tight end board is where drafts go to die — you spend a sixth-round pick to get a man who scores what the waiver wire scores. Take the cheap one with real usage. Tucker Kraft goes later than he should every single year and does the same thing every single year, and every single year the room acts surprised.

A Word About How I Am Wired

I know what I sound like. I sound like a man who has never enjoyed anything. My co-founder chases the ceiling and I check whether the ceiling has been inspected.

But I have watched a lot of people spend a fourth-round pick on last year's tight end crown, and I have watched almost all of them explain in November that the touchdowns should come. They should. They just do not have to.