After five seasons with the Miami Dolphins, including a 2022 season spent on the franchise tag, Mike Gesicki has found a new home for the 2023 campaign. Gesicki has signed a one-year, $9 million pact with the Dolphins’ fellow AFC Easters, the New England Patriots. This move reunites him with a coach that he has some history with, going back to Gesicki’s college days.
Mike Gesicki was recruited by Bill O’Brien to play his college ball at Penn State.
Now they are reunited in New England. https://t.co/JSSSWSsuUm
— Field Yates (@FieldYates) March 17, 2023
Gesicki was not a good fit with Mike McDaniel’s scheme for the Dolphins in 2022. But he has been a productive player in the NFL, and his landing with this team and this quarterback might make him interesting in fantasy for the year ahead.
2022 Review
2022 was Gesicki’s least productive season since his rookie year. Gesicki had 50-plus receptions and 570-plus yards in three straight seasons from 2019-2021, topping out at 73-780 in 2021. He played between 62% and 72% of the Dolphins’ snaps in those three seasons. But 2022 saw his snap count fall to 45% and his targets to 51. Gesicki caught 32 of them for 362 yards. After running 484 routes in 2021 (with a route participation rate of 70.8%), Gesicki was sent out on a pattern just 330 times last year. That was only 51.9% of the team’s dropbacks, according to the Stealing Signals tool.
With such a limited number of opportunities, it should not come as a shock that Gesicki wasn’t much of a fantasy factor. He had three games in which he finished as a TE1, including a week as the overall leading scorer at the TE spot. This came in Week 6, in which he matched a season-high with seven targets, catching six balls for 69 yards and two touchdowns. Gesicki seemed to do better whenever Tua Tagovailoa didn’t play, as his splits below show.
