Colby Parkinson

Colby Parkinson finished last year as a top-fifteen fantasy tight end — on eight touchdowns, which is more than he scored in his first five NFL seasons combined. Pick two-twenty-five, tight end thirty-four, is the market fading that season hard, and this episode is about why the fade is probably right.

The season, on Half-PPR scoring, with the Rams: fourteen games, forty-three catches on fifty-six targets for four hundred eight yards and eight touchdowns. Seven-point-seven points a game, twentieth among tight ends per game, fifteenth in total points. Third on the team in receiving yards, behind Puka Nacua and Davante Adams — a legitimate finish on paper, and one built almost entirely on a touchdown rate that has no business repeating.

The career is the tell, and it is stark. Before last year, his single-season high was two receiving touchdowns; across five NFL seasons he had scored five times, total. Then eight in one year. The catches — forty-three of them — are a modest, believable, repeatable number, right in line with his Rams role. The eight scores are the outlier the entire top-fifteen finish is balanced on top of. That is a rate nobody at the position sustains; regression here is not a risk, it is the base case.

The pattern beat is arithmetic, stated plainly. Tight-end targets are sticky — his volume, forty-three catches, is roughly who he is. But there is no tight-end touchdown-fade cohort in our library, so we do not dress it as one: eight touchdowns on forty-three catches is variance, and a normal rate on that volume is a middling tight end, not a top-fifteen one. Strip the eight scores back to a normal handful and the player underneath is a low-end, back-of-the-roster tight end — modest volume, a modest ceiling.

The situation makes it worse for anyone holding him. Parkinson is on an expiring contract and has been named a cut-or-trade candidate this offseason — releasing him saves the Rams around seven million dollars, per the reporting. Meanwhile the room around him got more crowded, not less: Tyler Higbee re-signed in March, the Rams spent a second-round pick on tight end Max Klare, and second-year man Terrance Ferguson is pushing for the receiving-tight-end job Parkinson would need to keep. Sean McVay still calls the plays, now with Nate Scheelhaase coordinating. The touchdowns are unlikely to repeat, and on this depth chart the snaps may not either.

The price: tight end thirty-four at pick two-twenty-five. The slot paid five-point-one a game; he produced seven-point-seven on eight touchdowns. Our verdict: watchlist. Normally a top-fifteen finish at a tight-end-thirty-four price would be a scream of a value — but this finish was touchdown-inflated and the role behind it is under threat from a re-signed veteran, a drafted rookie, and a cut-candidate contract. The discount to thirty-four might be exactly right. The caveat both ways: if he holds the job and even half those touchdowns repeat, thirty-four is cheap; if the room squeezes him out or he is cut, the finish was a phantom.

Watch the roster through camp — a cut or trade ends it — then the snap split with Ferguson and Higbee, and whether the red-zone role survives. Eight touchdowns made the season; the eight touchdowns are exactly what will not come back. If he's one of your guys, this show exists for your whole roster — every player, every week, all season.