Sportskeeda’s Tony Pauline recently dropped a sort of bombshell that brings some good news for those who like to approach dynasty rookie drafts in the RotoViz way:
In speaking with a few teams, they believe the most underrated player at the top of this draft is Georgia tight end Brock Bowers. While some have mocked Bowers into the middle part of Round 1, no team I spoke with believes he’ll get out of the top 10, and at the very latest he will end up with the Denver Broncos at pick 12. Bowers brings too much playmaking ability and consistency to fall out of the top dozen selections, and teams believe he’ll be a Day 1 starter.
He continues in a follow-up report:
As draft meetings are coming to a close, most teams I’ve spoken with have Bowers rated as the fifth or sixth player on their overall board.
Brock Bowers’ on-field exploits are well known. He put up numbers in his freshman season at Georgia that would be impressive for a wide receiver prospect, including over 2.2 yards per team attempt and a 29% dominator rating. If there’s any reason not to absolutely love Bowers, it’s that he doesn’t have the size of a Rob Gronkowski or a Travis Kelce. However, he’s basically the same size as Sam LaPorta and Dalton Kincaid.
The Red Flags
Yet this short list of upside scenarios does bring up at least one real reason for skepticism: three of the four players I named above were drafted outside the first round. If we assume top-10 draft capital, Bowers’ comp list is good, not great.
Yes, T.J. Hockenson is one of the top TEs in the league, and I am still a Kyle Pitts believer. Kincaid looks like he could be a star in the making. The other names on the list either took several years to break out (David Njoku, Zach Ertz) or failed entirely to live up to expectations (Tyler Eifert, Noah Fant, Eric Ebron).
Tight Ends Don’t Matter
The basic problem — which we in the analytics community have known for some time — is that the tight end position resembles the running back position more than many would care to admit, at least in terms of reality value. That RBs don’t matter is now taken for granted, and even taken too far in some cases. That TEs also don’t matter is only now starting to come into focus.
That’s not to say there aren’t difference makers at these positions. Christian McCaffrey has proven to be more than worth his top-eight draft capital, and most NFL teams would happily (and rightly) take Kelce in the first round if they could redraft the 2013 class. But in general, the difference between a TE you can draft in the first round and one you can draft on Day 2 is not that big. The most intuitive way to grasp this is simply to compare lists. Here are the top-25 players taken in each part of the draft since 2000, sorted by the number of PPR points they scored in their first two seasons. (Players who only have one season in our database are indicated by an asterisk.)
