The heart of 2021 fantasy football draft season is still a couple months away, but early indications suggest that the general public is not buying into a repeat performance from 2020 breakout tight end Logan Thomas.
Average draft position (ADP) data from the past few weeks shows Thomas coming off the board in the ninth round (eight tight ends are going earlier) of 12-team best ball leagues. That's quite the value for a player who finished as fantasy's No. 3 TE last season.
Thomas, who turns 30 on July 1, was drafted as a quarterback in 2014, but made the conversion to tight end in 2017. He was limited to a 35-317-2 receiving line on 55 targets during the 2017-19 seasons with Buffalo and Detroit prior to his breakout last season with the Washington Football Team.
Thomas played a massive 92% of Washington's offensive snaps last season. In fact, his 972 snaps and 584 pass routes led the position. Thomas also ranked top-four in targets (108) and receptions (72) while finishing no lower than ninth in yardage (670), touchdowns (six), OTD (5.7) and end zone targets (nine). Thomas received fewer than four targets in only one game and reached seven in eight of 17 games (including a nine-target effort in the wild card round). As ESPN NFL Nation Washington Football Team reporter John Keim wrote, Thomas won't catch anyone by surprise this season.
Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Thomas' big season was that he achieved it with four different quarterbacks. Of his 117 targets (including the playoff game), 50 came from Dwayne Haskins (31-239-1 receiving line), 42 from Alex Smith (30-281-3), 15 from Taylor Heinicke (9-122-0) and 10 from Kyle Allen (7-102-2). None of those four quarterbacks are projected starters in 2021 and yet Thomas produced at least one top-10 fantasy week with all four last season.
In 2021, Thomas will benefit from the arrival of Ryan Fitzpatrick. The 38-year-old's gunslinger mentality is well-documented, but it has resulted in strong play the past two seasons (he ranked fifth in QBR in 2020 and eighth in 2019). It's also resulted in good production for his top tight end during the span, as Fitzpatrick helped Mike Gesicki to a pair of top-12 fantasy campaigns.
The elephant in the room is, of course, Thomas' path to a consistently large target share. With Washington devoid of difference-makers at wide receiver behind Terry McLaurin last season, Thomas handled 19% of the targets and 22% of the air yards. The thought is that both numbers could drop this season after Curtis Samuel, Adam Humphries and third-round pick Dyami Brown were added at wide receiver, but I'm not so sure. Consider Washington's 2020 target distribution by position: RB 27%, WR 52%, TE 20%. That's compared to 19%, 60% and 21% league averages, respectively, and suggests that perhaps it's the running back room that will see a dip in targets (I'm looking at you, J.D. McKissic, with your ugly average of 5.3 YPT on an absurd 111 targets).
With all of that in mind, I landed on a 17% target share for Thomas in 16 projected games (18-19% weekly average). That still allows a healthy 24% share for McLaurin, 18% for Samuel, 13% combined for Humphries and Brown and 23% (still above league average) for the running backs. Assuming a midrange scoring offense, that's enough for McLaurin to post fringe WR1 numbers, Samuel and McKissic to push for flex production and lead back Antonio Gibson to post good RB2 numbers. It's also enough to allow a 67-705-6 receiving line on 101 targets for Thomas, which certainly places him in the midrange TE1 mix with a shot at another top-five fantasy campaign.
Thomas is one of the most undervalued players in early fantasy drafts and very easily could outscore tight ends being selected ahead of him on some sites, including T.J. Hockenson, Noah Fant, Dallas Goedert and rookie Kyle Pitts. A lot like Darren Waller this time last year, Thomas is being knocked on draft day because he has added competition for targets, but as Waller showed, good players get the rock. Taking advantage of Thomas' cheap cost is one path to maximizing your starting lineup in 2021.