the " never again " list

[Tom Kessenich]

Vernon Davis and Antonio Gates

All mid-tier TE's, go big or punt TE next year.

Sadly, even the top-tier TEs have had issues of some kind this season.

Gronk got hurt.
Graham got hurt and has been a bust the last month.
Hernandez got hurt.
Witten started slow.

TE has been an absolutely brutal position this season. Tony Gonzalez is probably the only guy you've been able to safely start each week without wanting to throw something through the TV a time or two.

[CALI CARTEL]

Basically if you took a consensus Top 8 TE this year, you've been left wanting...

Graham
Gronk
Hernandez
Gates
Finley
Witten
V.Davis
Pettigrew

[Tom Kessenich]

Basically if you took a consensus Top 8 TE this year, you've been left wanting...

Graham
Gronk
Hernandez
Gates
Finley
Witten
V.Davis
Pettigrew

Problem is that even the guys after that have had issues with the exception of Gonzalez. It's been tough to just find someone respectable at the position you can rely on week in and week out for the entire season. Seems like every TE you can think of (again with the possible exception of Gonzo) has had issues of some kind at various stages of the season.

[CALI CARTEL]

Problem is that even the guys after that have had issues with the exception of Gonzalez. It's been tough to just find someone respectable at the position you can rely on week in and week out for the entire season. Seems like every TE you can think of (again with the possible exception of Gonzo) has had issues of some kind at various stages of the season.

But the difference is, you didn't pay a Top 6 round pick to get one of those later TE's. The later TE might not have been all that consistent every single week, but who is at TE? I can't complain one bit about guys like Heath Miller, Greg Olsen, Martellus Bennett, Owen Daniels, Jacob Tamme, Dennis Pitta, Kyle Rudolph, Scott Chandler or Brandon Myers. You might get the occasional donut from guys like Rudolph/Pitta/Myers every couple of weeks, but is that any worse than Graham putting up a 4 for 25 line as a late 1st rounder?

[Sandman62]

So maybe TEs aren't first round worthy?

http://nffcforums.stats.com/viewtopic.p ... 10#p175016

[KenGill]

Looks like Sandman nailed the commentary on the TE's. Bottom line, you better get guaranteed production from your round 1 pick. Picking a TE who had one great year on a team with a million other weapons looked like a receipe for disaster.

[Tom Kessenich]

Looks like Sandman nailed the commentary on the TE's. Bottom line, you better get guaranteed production from your round 1 pick. Picking a TE who had one great year on a team with a million other weapons looked like a receipe for disaster.

If you assume that player is going to get injured (like both Gronk and Graham did) and miss a large number of games (like Gronk did) and be mired in the worst slump of their entire career which came completely unexpectedly (like Graham is currently going through) then yes avoiding an elite TE early is a very good idea.

Of course, if you have those kind of prognostication skills you hopefully are sitting on an island somewhere counting the millions you just won in Powerball.

[Sandman62]

Is it so crazy to assume that, until there is a track record of a few years, a player who has already missed a couple games in their lone year as a starter is not yet deemed to be a rock solid lock to play a full 16 games?

Some of us prefer a "guilty til proven innocent" approach, and wait until an actual trend longer than ONE season occurs, at which point we start drafting certain players at a position long before others (i.e. top-3 RBs and QBs). TE still isn't among them and next year we'll see them go back to not being drafted until round 3 or 4.

[Tom Kessenich]

Injuries can occur to any player. Tom Brady has been remarkably durable throughout his entire career, with one glaring exception. My point is that Gronkowski's season was derailed by an injury, not by poor production. Graham also got hurt and had never been injured before. When Gronk was healthy he was producing at a strong level. Graham was also producing at a strong level when healthy before his out-of-nowhere recent slump.

We can quibble about whether either should've been first-round picks but as far as production goes I'll happily take what Gronk was producing before his injury and what Graham was generating prior to the last month when healthy, especially when you consider how God-awful the TE position has been this season. Give me that type of quality, consistent production at the position and I'm a happy man. If you'll recall, that was the primary point I made as to why both were safe late first-round picks and both came through in that regard before something completely unexpected occurred.

I will not view either player as a first-round pick next year primarily because there look to be a significantly higher number of first-round RB options that should be available than there were this season. But both are on my late-second, early-third round list of targets. I'll take my chances that Gronk won't suffer a major injury two seasons in a row and Graham won't unexpectedly vanish from the high-powered Saints' offense two seasons in a row. Both are elite talents and will be high on my list of players I want on my roster next season and I will be prepared to make an early push to get them. Those are the types of players you can win big with.

[CALI CARTEL]

Both Graham & Gronk battled injuries most of last season as well -- Gronk's were minor, but there were signs of Graham being injury prone in both of his previous seasons.