Players I Can't Quit: George Kittle Is The NFL's Best TE, And An ADP Value
Sometimes, no matter how many times a player doesn’t deliver at the level you expects, or his talent dictates he should, you get angry and cross them off your list for the future. And other times, you just keep coming back to the well. 49ers TE George Kittle exemplifies this phenomenon.
Kittle’s numbers often look great at the end of the season, but the road to them is always littered with potholes, and that’s when he isn’t missing time with injuries, which has happened in all but one of his seven seasons. That combination of negative factors has contributed to his current ADP of No. 76 overall, making him the TE8 off the board. That is a drop of almost 20 picks from last season, and this is coming off a 1,020-yard season.
Why the drop for the only 1,000-yard TE in the NFL in 2023? It’s because he had six games with 30 or fewer receiving yards, and 11 games with four or fewer receptions. For all Kittle’s talent, he’s very often uninvolved in the passing game or busy blocking at an elite level for Christian McCaffery. But that’s the negative, and the positive is that when George Kittle goes off, you’re winning weeks.
If he had that many low-yardage games, how did he hit the 1,000-yard mark? By going crazy in the other ones! Kittle surpassed 115 yards thrice in 2023, in Week 10 lighting up the Jaguars for 116 yards and a touchdown on just four targets (three receptions). Kittle was targeted 5+ times in nine games last season, and in those games he went over 65 yards in seven of them. These blowup games are no fluke or mistake, Kittle is arguably the best TE in football. Maybe that sounds disrespectful to the legend Travis Kelce, but Kittle was on his heels in points, amassed 36 more receiving yards on 28 fewer receptions, and gained much larger chunks of yardage when he was targeted. Kelce was PFF’s No. 2 TE, behind only……..George Kittle whose insane 81.1 run blocking grade pushed him over the top. And while run blocking isn’t any kind of useful fantasy metric, it does keep Kittle on the field at all times as he outsnapped Kelce on the year. Kelce is four years older than Kittle, and scored nearly the same amount of points, so why would he go more than 40 picks earlier?
Year after year, Kittle is ranked near the top of every advanced metric for the position, he’s eclipsed the 1,000-yard mark three times and scored at least six touchdowns in each of the last three seasons, peaking with 11 in 2022. The 49ers scored the third-most points in the NFL in 2023, piled up the second-most yards, and scored the second-most touchdowns through the air despite attempting the fewest passes in the league. Kittle is a hyper-efficient playmaker on the NFL’s most efficient team. The “too many mouths to feed” trope does, at times, affect him; McCaffery, Deebo Samuel and Brandon Aiyuk do demand targets, and Kittle is more suited than they are to contribute without the football. But injuries happen, and Aiyuk’s place on the roster is currently tenuous. All it takes is one piece to be missing or diminished, and, voila!, Kittle is a central cog of the passing game in an instant.
Even with his inconsistency, Kittle’s big games are explosions, and there is still upside for him to deliver extreme efficiency on a consistent basis. The highest probability is that he’ll be frustrating for a lot of weeks, but I simply can’t quit his intoxicating talent.