Jake Ferguson

Jake Ferguson caught eighty-two passes last season. Only two tight ends in football caught more. The market's response is tight end thirteen at pick one-twelve — a price that quietly assumes the eight touchdowns were the fluke and the eighty-two catches weren't. The data mostly agrees, and that's worth walking through.

The season: seventeen games, eighty-two catches on a hundred two targets, six hundred yards, eight scores — all career highs in catches and touchdowns — for eight-point-seven Half-PPR points a game, thirteenth among tight ends per game, eighth in total points. Dallas went seven, nine, and one, and Ferguson made the Pro Bowl roster, per the team site in January. The catch rate was eighty percent, and the hundred forty-seven total Half-PPR points nearly doubled his twenty-twenty-four.

The career is a sawtooth: eight-three points a game in twenty-twenty-three, then a five-four crater with zero touchdowns in twenty-twenty-four, then eight-seven. Which year was the aberration is the entire question, and the answer decides if this price is right. Worth noting on the durability side: he's played all seventeen twice in the last three years. Dallas fed him triple-digit targets for the second time in three years — a hundred two, matching his hundred two from twenty-twenty-three exactly.

The patterns say: bet on the volume, shrug at the touchdowns. Tight end targets replicate at point-eight year over year — two hundred thirty-eight player-seasons — and Ferguson's six targets a game across two healthy seasons is a real identity. Touchdowns are the least sticky stat we track, and he's lived both tails of that already: zero one year, eight the next. A quarter of his fantasy production last season came from scores. Some of that is coming out; the catches are the part history keeps.

The situation is stability with a knee-shaped asterisk. Ferguson signed his extension last July and is under contract into the future Dallas built around Dak — who was mostly held out of June minicamp with a sore knee, per the team site, after leading team drills on day one. Brian Schottenheimer enters year two as head coach and still calls the plays, with Klayton Adams back as coordinator, per the team site. The target tree above Ferguson didn't thin: CeeDee Lamb, and George Pickens on a twenty-seven-point-three-million franchise tag the Cowboys have said they will not extend before the July fifteenth deadline, per NFL.com in June. Javonte Williams returns in the backfield. The quiet bull case is continuity itself: the same play-caller whose first year produced his tight end's career highs, on a team that missed the field and returns its top three targets.

The price: TE13 for the TE13-by-rate, TE8-by-total season — the market has him dead on his per-game number and gives the durability away free. TE13 assumes the first tight end off your bench; TE8 in total points is what he just returned. Our verdict: no call. Price and history agree; the touchdown regression the price implies is the same regression our patterns imply. Caveat spoken: it cuts the other way too — if the red-zone role that produced eight scores is real, TE8 in total points at pick one-twelve was the discount, and volume tight ends attached to healthy Dak seasons have a habit of beating their tag.

Watch his September target rate — six a game means the identity held — and where he sits in the red-zone pecking order behind Lamb and Pickens. The same volume with merely average touchdown luck is a top-eight season again — that's the quiet path this price leaves open. If he's on your roster, this show covers all of it — every player, every week, all season.