The Ultimate (early) 2026 Fantasy Football TE Rankings

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**Josh** (1:11)
Let's rank a whole bunch of tight ends. I mean, it feels like every single year, we can have a massive discussion about this position, not just in fantasy, but real football. I mean, it's a massive impact across the league right now. You saw that in free agency, the draft really bore that out. I mean, we might be talking about Hayden, about eight teams last season being very comfortable using two and three tight end sets to what? Half the league, 20 teams at this point, after all these teams added new players to the roster. So just big picture question here, does that alter your approach to drafting this position this year?

**Hayden** (1:43)
It does. We have some rookies that are going to get involved here, which is going to increase just like the personnel stuff. I think what ends up happening is just like the wide receivers and like the middle part of the fantasy drafts just project worse than all of a sudden. If you're looking at a tight end projection and a wide receiver projection in round 10, and it's like, oh, the tight ends like have more yards this year. So I think that's where it comes. It's like at the expense, not that a bunch of tight ends are like scoring more points by themselves. It's more just that the other positions are now hurt because the tight end two on a team is scoring at the expense of the wide receiver three on a team. So I think that those are kind of minor adjustments.
I felt and I think also for this year, a lot of really, really good promising young tight ends about to break out. So we've kind of gone away from the Kelsey and Kittles finally after like what a full decade of those guys. Now we got the next tier Bowers, McBride, Loveland, some others. And I'm pretty excited about those guys.

**Josh** (2:37)
Yeah, but the Kittle, Kelseys, they're holding on to the word. They're holding on and definitely are around, you know, Titan 9 to Titan 12 territory. We'll talk about them today. Yeah, just from a strategy perspective, I look back at how I drafted this position last year. And if I didn't get, you know, Trey McBride and George Kittle in like that round two through four territory, then I was willing to wait on, you know, Tyler Warren, who's being drafted as Titan 7 or Tucker Kraft being drafted as Titan 11 And I missed out on all of those. Then you and I, especially from a best ball perspective, really love to Dr. Franken sign the position anywhere from, you know, round 14 through round 18, drafting three of those guys and just hoping for touchdowns because that matters so much for the spot. I've been doing that kind of more and more this year. I don't love all these late round Titans like I did last off season. So we're definitely talk about that throughout the summer. And obviously this episode too.

**Hayden** (3:30)
Yeah, on that, I'm doing something I've never really done before. I like two tight ends, not all the way early, but this late round tight end strategy that I've adopted for literally the last five years of doing the show with you. Right. This is the first year where I feel really good about the top nine tight ends. And I'm just kind of getting two of those guys and then kind of stopping there, sometimes adding on a third tight end. But just all these young guys like Kyle Pitts, all these guys in the top 10 that we'll talk about today, they have tons of upside. And right now the price tag isn't isn't too crazy.

**Josh** (4:03)
This is going to be a conversation all summer, you know, heavy personnel looks and it's not just tight ends, it's full backs on the field too. So buckle in. We'll talk about it again all summer long. Okay, let's rank these guys. Your tight end one this year is Brock Bowers with Clint Kubiak being his new play caller with the Las Vegas Raiders.