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) — 266.6 proj. pts, VOR 116.1, ADP #32
- 2. Kyle Pitts (TE, ATL) — 222.4 proj. pts, VOR 71.9, ADP #88
- 3. Travis Kelce (TE, KC) — 209.3 proj. pts, VOR 58.8, ADP #98
- 4. Colston Loveland (TE, CHI) — 206.9 proj. pts, VOR 56.4, ADP #48
Tier 2
- 5. Harold Fannin Jr. (TE, CLE) — 203.5 proj. pts, VOR 53.1, ADP #69
- 6. Dallas Goedert (TE, PHI) — 192.5 proj. pts, VOR 42.0, ADP #123
- 7. Tyler Warren (TE, IND) — 176.8 proj. pts, VOR 26.4, ADP #54
- 8. Mark Andrews (TE, BAL) — 171.4 proj. pts, VOR 20.9, ADP #129
Tier 3
- 9. George Kittle (TE, SF) — 166.4 proj. pts, VOR 16.0, ADP #109
- 10. Brock Bowers (TE, LV) — 166.2 proj. pts, VOR 15.8, ADP #37
- 11. Juwan Johnson (TE, NO) — 162.7 proj. pts, VOR 12.2, ADP #148
- 12. Dalton Schultz (TE, HOU) — 161.2 proj. pts, VOR 10.7, ADP #177
Tier 4
- 13. Zach Ertz (TE, WAS) — 159.4 proj. pts, VOR 8.9
- 14. T.J. Hockenson (TE, MIN) — 150.4 proj. pts, VOR 0.0, ADP #153
- 15. Chig Okonkwo (TE, WAS) — 149.1 proj. pts, VOR -1.4, ADP #172
- 16. Hunter Henry (TE, NE) — 146.7 proj. pts, VOR -3.7, ADP #142
Tier 5
- 17. Theo Johnson (TE, NYG) — 142.3 proj. pts, VOR -8.1
- 18. Jake Ferguson (TE, DAL) — 136.5 proj. pts, VOR -13.9, ADP #115
- 19. Pat Freiermuth (TE, PIT) — 129.9 proj. pts, VOR -20.5
- 20. Oronde Gadsden II (TE, LAC) — 129.8 proj. pts, VOR -20.7, ADP #169
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- Dalton Schultz (TE, HOU) — our rank #82, market ADP #177 (+95 picks)
- Chig Okonkwo (TE, WAS) — our rank #96, market ADP #172 (+76 picks)
- Dallas Goedert (TE, PHI) — our rank #49, market ADP #123 (+74 picks)
- Juwan Johnson (TE, NO) — our rank #80, market ADP #148 (+68 picks)
- Travis Kelce (TE, KC) — our rank #34, market ADP #98 (+64 picks)
Reaches
Players the market drafts significantly EARLIER than our board ranks them.
- Tucker Kraft (TE, GB) — our rank #189, market ADP #73 (-116 picks)
- Sam LaPorta (TE, DET) — our rank #164, market ADP #72 (-92 picks)
- Isaiah Likely (TE, NYG) — our rank #180, market ADP #135 (-45 picks)
- Brock Bowers (TE, LV) — our rank #76, market ADP #37 (-39 picks)
- Dalton Kincaid (TE, BUF) — our rank #146, market ADP #136 (-10 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 TE Cliffs: Why Scarcity Isn't Evenly Distributed
The gap between McBride's VOR of 116.1 and Pitts' 71.9 is larger than the gap between Pitts and the entire rest of the top ten combined. That's the defining feature of tight end scarcity in 2026: it isn't a smooth slope, it's a cliff with one player standing alone above it. Positions like RB or WR tend to have several players clustered near the top; TE this year has a true outlier, which changes how much premium a drafter should be willing to pay for the top spot versus waiting for the next tier.
Three rookies — Loveland, Fannin, and Warren — all crack the top seven by projected points, which is a notable cluster of unproven names carrying real expected value. First-year tight ends historically take longer to acclimate than receivers because of blocking responsibilities and target competition, so while the projections reflect real opportunity, the season-one range of outcomes for rookie TEs is inherently wider than for the veterans around them.
The value/reach split tells a story about recency and name equity. Established, lower-profile producers like Goedert, Schultz, and even Kelce are being drafted behind their projected output, while last year's breakout narratives — Bowers, LaPorta, Kraft — carry ADP momentum that our tiers don't fully support. That's less about talent and more about how quickly draft-day memory forms around a hot rookie season versus a quietly consistent veteran one.
Kelce's case is its own subplot: a future value gap of 64 picks despite being a well-known commodity suggests the market is pricing in decline risk more aggressively than the underlying production numbers justify, at least based on this projection set.
Included with every account — even the free one.