Biggest Surprises of 2020 - Tight End

The 2020 NFL season is in the rearview mirror, but before we look ahead to 2021, let's take some time to look back.

Every year, there are big surprises in the league. Someone comes out of nowhere to have a huge year. Someone we thought was about to regress due to age has a much better season than expected. Things we thought would happen don't happen.

Today, let's look at the tight ends that were the most surprising this season.

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Robert Tonyan, Green Bay Packers

You know that old narrative about Aaron Rodgers not targeting tight ends? Well, it definitely had some truth to it at some point in the past, but not in 2020 with Robert Tonyan finishing as the overall fantasy TE3.

Tonyan's numbers outside of his 11 touchdowns don't really jump off the page. For example, these opportunity numbers per Player Profiler, with the rankings here being where he ranked among all tight ends:

Those aren't great numbers, but because the tight end position after Travis Kelce and Darren Waller really bottoms out, Tonyan's ability to find the end zone helped boost his numbers. Tonyan developed a solid rapport with Rodgers down in the red zone, and he added to that by being very efficient with the opportunities he did get. He was third among TEs in yards per target, first in catch rate, and first in target separation. He created space and caught a large percentage of the passes that came his way.

So, what about next season? Unfortunately, Tonyan feels a little like a letdown candidate. It seems impossible to think he'll have the same quality of targets two years in a row, and catching double-digit touchdowns isn't easy. Tonyan's going to end up being overdrafted next season.

Logan Thomas, Washington Football Team

The former college quarterback turned tight end was TE6 on the season and TE3 from Week 13 to Week 17.

Thomas has some things going for him that help him immensely. He's tall. He's fast. And he ran more routes than any other tight end this season.

Thomas was incredibly productive, ranking in the top five at tight end in slot snaps, targets, deep targets, and receptions. Washington's lack of high-tier receiving options outside of Terry McLaurin meant that the cavalcade of passers that the team used needed to rely on Thomas to help move the chains and get points on the board.

Before 2020, that would have sounded crazy. Logan Thomas? A reliable tight end? But he really put the physical stuff together with the productivity this year in a way that worked for Washington.

Whereas I'm not going to be very interested in Tonyan next year, I'll be much more interested in Logan Thomas. He'll have a key role in next year's team, so draft him as a TE1.

Rob Gronkowski, Tampa Bay Buccaneers

Two big reasons Gronk should not have finished as a top-10 fantasy tight end: he didn't play football in 2019 and he was playing in a Bruce Arians offense that has traditionally not emphasized tight end.

One big reason we should have ignored both of those things: Rob Gronkowski was playing football on a team whose quarterback was Tom Brady.

Gronk managed to stay healthy all year, playing 16 games for the first time since 2011. And while he didn't have a vintage Gronk season, finishing with 38.9 yards per game, his second-lowest mark ever, he caught seven touchdowns. That was enough to land him a TE8 finish.

So, while the days of Gronk as an elite tight end are over, he appears to be someone who can still produce when necessary. Of course, that depends on Gronk returning for another season, and there's no guarantee that he does, especially considering he's done this "will he retire and pursue other things" thing before. But with Tom Brady likely back for (at least) one more go of things in Tampa, it's not hard to see a scenario where Gronk suits up for another season. He'd be a low-end TE1 option.

Jimmy Graham, Chicago Bears

Graham finished as the TE10 despite the fact that the 34-year-old had been trending down the past few years.

What happened? As with Tonyan, touchdowns happened, as Graham caught eight of them. He wasn't getting the targets and yards that vintage Saints Jimmy Graham got, but he was finding the end zone at a rate that looked a lot like his older days.

The issue with Graham that suggests this one-year bounceback was a blip on the radar is that his playing time faded as the year went on. Through the first nine games, he had 35 receptions for 302 yards and never played under 62 percent of snaps. After that, he had 15 catches in the final seven games for 154 yards and three touchdowns while playing over half the snaps just twice.

The emergence of Cole Kmet means that while Graham managed to surprisingly finish as a top-10 tight end, his role in Chicago next year is essentially gone. Kmet will be the starter.

So, while Graham was better than he had been over the past couple of years, 2020 was probably the final time we can rely on him as a fantasy tight end.

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