2026 TE Fantasy Draft Rankings — Tiers, VOR & ADP Values
Our Tight Ends (TE) draft board for 2026: top 20 by value over replacement (VOR), grouped into tiers. Tier breaks mark real drop-offs in projected value over replacement — players inside a tier are close in value; crossing into the next tier is a bigger gap.
Tier 1
- 1. Trey McBride (TE, ARI) — 264.2 proj. pts, VOR 116.1, ADP #29
- 2. Brock Bowers (TE, LV) — 210.5 proj. pts, VOR 62.5, ADP #36
- 3. Travis Kelce (TE, KC) — 209.3 proj. pts, VOR 61.2, ADP #108
- 4. Colston Loveland (TE, CHI) — 206.9 proj. pts, VOR 58.8, ADP #56
Tier 2
- 5. Harold Fannin Jr. (TE, CLE) — 203.5 proj. pts, VOR 55.5, ADP #77
- 6. George Kittle (TE, SF) — 197.1 proj. pts, VOR 49.0, ADP #97
- 7. Kyle Pitts (TE, ATL) — 191.9 proj. pts, VOR 43.9, ADP #80
- 8. Dallas Goedert (TE, PHI) — 185.8 proj. pts, VOR 37.7, ADP #110
Tier 3
- 9. Tyler Warren (TE, IND) — 176.8 proj. pts, VOR 28.8, ADP #68
- 10. Mark Andrews (TE, BAL) — 175.8 proj. pts, VOR 27.7, ADP #129
- 11. Zach Ertz (TE, WAS) — 173.4 proj. pts, VOR 25.4
- 12. Juwan Johnson (TE, NO) — 155.6 proj. pts, VOR 7.5, ADP #155
Tier 4
- 13. Hunter Henry (TE, NE) — 148.8 proj. pts, VOR 0.7, ADP #175
- 14. T.J. Hockenson (TE, MIN) — 148.1 proj. pts, VOR 0.0, ADP #193
- 15. Dalton Schultz (TE, HOU) — 147.1 proj. pts, VOR -1.0, ADP #186
- 16. Sam LaPorta (TE, DET) — 146.4 proj. pts, VOR -1.7, ADP #115
Tier 5
- 17. Pat Freiermuth (TE, PIT) — 144.1 proj. pts, VOR -4.0, ADP #213
- 18. Chig Okonkwo (TE, WAS) — 140.1 proj. pts, VOR -8.0, ADP #200
- 19. Jake Ferguson (TE, DAL) — 135.2 proj. pts, VOR -12.9, ADP #131
- 20. Jonnu Smith (TE, GB) — 132.8 proj. pts, VOR -15.3
Draft values
Players the market (ADP) drafts significantly LATER than our board ranks them — that gap is where draft value lives.
Find the bets where soft books misprice the odds.
See today's value bets — free account- Pat Freiermuth (TE, PIT) — our rank #104, market ADP #213 (+109 picks)
- T.J. Hockenson (TE, MIN) — our rank #94, market ADP #193 (+99 picks)
- Chig Okonkwo (TE, WAS) — our rank #105, market ADP #200 (+95 picks)
- Dalton Schultz (TE, HOU) — our rank #98, market ADP #186 (+88 picks)
- Hunter Henry (TE, NE) — our rank #90, market ADP #175 (+85 picks)
Reaches
Players the market drafts significantly EARLIER than our board ranks them.
- Terrance Ferguson (TE, LA) — our rank #251, market ADP #194 (-57 picks)
- Greg Dulcich (TE, MIA) — our rank #232, market ADP #195 (-37 picks)
- Tucker Kraft (TE, GB) — our rank #127, market ADP #102 (-25 picks)
- David Njoku (TE, LAC) — our rank #167, market ADP #146 (-21 picks)
The full Tight Ends (TE) board with every tier.
More draft prep: our mock draft simulator, the sleepers & reaches board and NFL player props for the season.
Full TE board — freeReading the Shape of the Position
The VOR curve at tight end tells its own story this year: an enormous chasm between McBride (116.1) and everyone else, a tight cluster from picks 2-8 (43.9 to 62.5), and then a hard flatline starting around rank 13, where value bottoms out near replacement level and stays there. That shape is the classic TE argument for going early or waiting — the middle tiers barely separate, so reaching for TE6 over TE14 buys you very little.
Two rookies sitting in the top five — Loveland and Fannin — is worth flagging as a projection bet rather than a proven pattern. Rookie tight ends have historically been among the slowest fantasy assets to produce as first-year players, since the position leans heavily on route-tree nuance and chemistry that often takes a year to build. Their inclusion this high says more about offensive scheme and target-share opportunity than about a track record, and that's an honest caveat worth carrying into draft day.
The Kelce and Kittle profiles are a useful lens on how the model treats aging veterans differently from the market. Both sit multiple tiers above their ADP, which suggests the projections are weighting recent usage and offensive role over age-related decline narratives that tend to dominate public perception. Whether that's the correct read only plays out over a season, but it's a clear point of disagreement between our numbers and the crowd worth tracking as the year unfolds.
Included with every account — even the free one.