Evan Engram

Evan Engram caught fifty passes last year and scored exactly one touchdown. That one-touchdown season on real tight-end volume is the most obvious buy-low signal at the position — and the reason he is a cut candidate is the same reason he is available at pick two-twenty-three, tight end thirty-two. This episode prices both.

The season, on Half-PPR scoring, in Denver: sixteen games, fifty catches on seventy-six targets for four hundred sixty-one yards and that lone score. Four-point-nine points a game, thirty-fifth among tight ends per game, twenty-ninth in total. Thirteen and a half percent of Denver's targets in his games — genuine starting tight-end volume — turned into almost nothing in the end zone. Third on the team in receiving yards. The role was there; the touchdowns were not, and one score on fifty catches is the lowest rate you will find on real volume anywhere in this range.

The career says the volume is real when the body cooperates. Two years ago he caught a hundred fourteen passes for nearly a thousand yards — a top-tier tight-end season. An injury cost him most of twenty-twenty-four; last year he played a full sixteen games at a diminished per-catch rate. The through-line across the healthy years is targets: given the snaps, he draws them.

The pattern beat is the whole bull case. Tight end targets per game is the stickiest stat we track — point-seven-two and point-eight-oh across the eras, n of two hundred fifty-one and two hundred thirty-eight — so his volume is the part that repeats. And one touchdown on seventy-six targets is not a skill; it is variance at its most extreme. There is no tight-end touchdown-fade cohort in our library, so we say it as arithmetic: the catches come back, and a normal touchdown rate on that volume is worth points this price does not assume.

The situation is why the discount exists. Sean Payton handed play-calling to new coordinator Davis Webb — the first time in nearly two decades Payton will not call his own plays — and Payton has said publicly he views Engram as a key piece and wants to add to his workload, per the beat. But Engram carries a cap number north of fourteen million with only five guaranteed, which is why one insider floated that he may not survive to camp — and Denver drafted two tight ends in April to hedge. It is Bo Nix's offense, with Courtland Sutton and Troy Franklin outside; the move-tight-end role is Engram's to hold, on a fourteen-and-three team that earned the one seed.

The price: tight end thirty-two at pick two-twenty-three. The slot paid five-point-five a game; he produced four-point-nine on one touchdown. Our verdict: watchlist. The volume-plus-touchdown-regression math is a real buy-low — but you cannot lean into a player the team is openly weighing as a cap cut, with two rookie tight ends drafted behind him. The caveat is the fork: if he holds the job and the touchdowns normalize, tight end thirty-two was a bargain; if he is cut or the rookies take the snaps, the volume that makes the bet work disappears.

Watch the roster through camp first — a cut ends the thesis — then the touchdown rate off its floor, and whether Webb's offense feeds the move tight end or the rookies. The catches are the bet; the end zone is the upside; the roster spot is the risk. If he's one of your guys, this show exists for your whole roster — every player, every week, all season.