Brock Bowers

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• Camp · Aug 23, 2026Aug 23, 2026

  Brock Bowers Camp Update — August 23: The Standout of the Houston Joint Work

  Bowers was the standout performer of Tuesday's joint practice against Houston, catching multiple passes including a red-zone touchdown. The game itself came with the first team held out, so the target-volume question the June comparison hinges on still waits for live counts.

• Camp · Aug 16, 2026Aug 17, 2026

  Brock Bowers Camp Update — August 16: Open on Every Play Changes the Argument

  The Associated Press says Bowers is returning to form in camp, getting open on nearly every snap a year after a knee injury compromised his whole season. The June comparison case rested on his depressed target volume — and the health story behind it is dissolving.

• 2026 PreviewJun 13, 2026

  Brock Bowers 2026 Season Preview — the board is backwards

  Bowers finished as the TE9 in 2025, averaging 12 half-PPR points across 12 games. His season rested on target volume — the kind of input that carries year to year — rather than touchdown luck or efficiency spikes that tend to evaporate.

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  Show notes & transcript

  The market says Brock Bowers is the first tight end off the board and Trey McBride is the second. The single stickiest statistic at the position says the market has it backwards. This is part one of a two-part episode — Bowers today, McBride tomorrow — and it's the cleanest relative call we'll make at tight end. The Muffed 2026 preview.

  First, real respect for the season, because Bowers is excellent. In 12 games he posted a 23 percent target share and alpha-receiver air-yards usage, turning 86 targets into 64 catches, 680 yards, and seven touchdowns — 12 a game, fourth among tight ends per game, on a bottom-three passing offense whose quarterback was sacked 55 times. The signature: a Week 9 overtime loss to Jacksonville where he went 12 catches, a hundred 27 yards, three touchdowns. When the offense could function, he was a cheat code.

  Now the call, and it's a comparison, not a knock. The one tight-end stat that carries over year to year is targets per game — it repeats at a correlation around point eight, far ahead of efficiency. In 2025 that number ran 9.9 for McBride and 7.2 for Bowers. And the scoreboard followed: McBride at 14-nine a game, TE1, versus Bowers' 12, TE4. The market has them flipped. When the stickiest signal and last year's actual finish both say McBride was the better fantasy tight end, paying up for Bowers is paying for the name, not the data.

  Here's the honest part that keeps this a lean and not a hard fade: Bowers played 12 games, and his rookie season — the year before — was a hundred-12-catch, nine-targets-a-game monster. The healthy, full version of Bowers has exactly the volume profile that the pattern rewards. So this isn't "Bowers is bad" — it's "you're paying a premium over McBride for a player who, on last year's healthy-game rate, trailed him." That's a relative misprice, not a player you avoid.

  The situation, per the reports, cleared up in two directions: the knee and the quarterback. Bowers played through a PCL sprain and bone bruise from the season opener for 12 games before December injured reserve, and he told reporters at May OTAs he feels a hundred percent. New head coach Klint Kubiak is openly smitten — he called Bowers "a football robot from heaven" — and the quarterback room went from chaos to a plan: the Raiders traded Geno Smith to the Jets, signed Kirk Cousins in April on 20 million guaranteed, and used the first overall pick on Heisman winner Fernando Mendoza. Cousins ran the first team all spring and is widely expected to open the season, with the rookie developing behind him.

  The price: pick 18 — the same 17.7 ADP as McBride, who now goes first. Verdict: LEAN overpriced — and the re-check keeps it, with the arithmetic updated: the market now pays the identical price for Bowers as for the tight end who outscored him by almost three points a game. The old version of this call said "take McBride a few picks later." You can't anymore — so take McBride, period, and let someone else pay TE-one-adjacent money for the TE2 production. The counter, fairly: if the knee was the whole story and Kubiak's offense restores his rookie-year target volume with competent quarterback play, the talent ceiling is still the highest at the position, and this lean dies fast. We just don't pay a premium for the ceiling when the floor finished fourth.

  September watch: targets per game — his rookie year ran about nine a game and last season sagged to about seven; back toward nine and the pattern flips, stuck at seven and the call holds. And the knee's explosiveness in September, the quiet variable under everything. He's one of your guys? This show covers your whole roster — every player, every week, all season.

• 2025 ReviewMay 11, 2026

  Brock Bowers 2025 Season in Review

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  Show notes & transcript

  Brock Bowers finished 2025 as the number 11 tight end in total PPR scoring — and the number 2 tight end in PPR per game among players with at least six games. That gap tells the whole story. When Bowers was on the field, he was one of the two most productive tight ends in football. He just only played 12 games for a three-and-14 Raiders team that finished dead last in offensive expected points added. He was the engine of a passing game with no other answers — Tre Tucker led the team in receiving yards with just 696, and Bowers sat right there at 680 despite missing five games. Elite role, disaster roster, availability tax. The number 2 per-game rank is the headline. The number 11 total rank is the asterisk.

  Now let's dig into the numbers that explain it. Bowers turned 86 targets into 64 catches for 680 yards and 7 touchdowns, averaging 14.7 PPR per game. His average target share was 23 percent and his average air yards share 25 percent — alpha-receiver workloads, not tight-end workloads, on a team where Geno Smith was sacked 55 times and the offense ranked 30th in passing expected points added at minus 107.6. His receiving expected points added came in at plus 23.3, a clear positive on a unit deeply negative everywhere else. On consistency, this was a steady floor with one true ceiling spike — eight of his 12 games landed between 8.8 and 15.3 PPR, three more in the 14-to-23 range, and the week 9 Jacksonville game erupted for 43.3. Strip that outlier and he still averages roughly 12 PPR a game on a bottom-three offense, which is why the per-game rank held. The floor was the story. The ceiling game was the bonus.

  The defining moment came in that overtime loss to the Jaguars in week 9: 12 catches, 127 yards, 3 touchdowns. Two minutes left, second and four at the Jacksonville 27, Raiders down 20 to 16 — Geno Smith hit Bowers on a short middle route and Bowers turned it into a 27-yard touchdown. Nine air yards, 18 after the catch, worth plus 3.25 in expected points. That play was the season in miniature: a tight end used like a number one receiver, creating after the catch because nothing else on the offense could create anything at all. Three of his seven touchdowns came in that single game. The other four were scattered thin across a roster that simply couldn't finish drives.