Updated Sep 7, 2026 · Week 1 board.
The Week 1 tight end gap, by our own numbers
Eight tight ends, ordered by what the board projects for the opener, with the auction dollar and the price per projected point beside each one.
| Player | Team | Projected pts (PPR) | Board rank | ADP | Auction $ | $ per point |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brock Bowers | LV | 15.60 | TE1 | 34.3 | $25 | 1.60 |
| Trey McBride | ARI | 14.35 | TE2 | 30.7 | $29 | 2.02 |
| Tyler Warren | IND | 12.24 | TE3 | 66.0 | $10 | 0.82 |
| Colston Loveland | CHI | 12.05 | TE4 | 53.9 | $15 | 1.24 |
| Sam LaPorta | DET | 10.95 | TE6 | 103.0 | $4 | 0.37 |
| Kyle Pitts | ATL | 10.41 | TE8 | 81.6 | $7 | 0.67 |
| Travis Kelce | KC | 9.81 | TE10 | 107.3 | $4 | 0.41 |
| George Kittle | SF | 8.36 | TE18 | 89.4 | $6 | 0.72 |
Top to bottom that table spans 7.24. Everybody between the ends sits within four of everybody else, which at tight end is almost nothing. Read the last column instead. It falls from $2.02 to 37 cents across players the board can barely tell apart.
Where draft price and the board disagree
McBride is the priciest tight end in the pool at $29 and he's second on the board, so nobody's robbing you. You're paying retail. Warren costs $10 and finishes third on the same list. Eighty-two cents a point against $2.02, and the whole week separates them by 2.11.
Sam LaPorta surprised me. I checked it twice. Four dollars, sixth at the position, 37 cents a point. The room drafts him 103rd and drafts McBride 30th.
I haven't got a story for that and I'm not inventing one. I've got the division, and the division says LaPorta is the cheapest of the eight names above by a wide margin.
One correction on myself before you act on that. Look past these eight names and the dollar tight ends beat him outright on price per point. T.J. Hockenson costs $1 and comes back at 9.20, thirteenth at the position, which is eleven cents a point.
Dalton Schultz is $1 at 8.36. If your league starts one tight end and you want the money elsewhere, that is the actual floor of this market, and it is a lot lower than $4.
FantasyPros' TE1 is not our TE1
FantasyPros' preseason PPR consensus, pulled Aug 15, has McBride first, Bowers second, Loveland third, Warren fourth, Harold Fannin fifth, Pitts sixth, Tucker Kraft seventh, LaPorta eighth, Kittle ninth. The board flips the top pair and shuffles the rest. Bowers first, McBride second, Warren third, Loveland fourth, Fannin fifth, LaPorta sixth. Closer agreement than this position manages.
So the argument isn't about who's good. It's about the price.
Kittle is the one real split, and it runs the opposite way from what a headline would want. The consensus has him ninth at the position in August. The board has him eighteenth for Sunday at 8.36. A preseason rank and a one-week projection measure two different things, and at tight end this week the difference shows up on exactly one name.
What TE premium scoring actually changes, and what we cannot re-score
Tight-end-premium scoring hands extra points per reception to tight ends only, which mechanically lifts the high-target, high-catch-rate guys over the touchdown-dependent ones. The board carries a plain PPR label and no scoring flag, so no half-PPR and no TE-premium version of it exists. It also carries no per-reception or per-target figure for any tight end, only the Week 1 point total. Re-scoring that into a true TE-premium number would mean inventing a reception count I don't have, and I'm not doing that in front of you.
What survives the format change is the price column. A premium format raises everybody at the position, so the cheapest points at the position get better, not worse, and that argument holds without a single extra number.
The Receipts Drawer
The number: 37 cents. Sam LaPorta, $4 against a 10.95 projection, sixth at his position. That is the cheapest of the eight names above, though not of the whole position: Hockenson at $1 and 9.20 is eleven cents a point. Tyler Warren at 82 cents is the same idea one round earlier.
Where this breaks: Detroit spreads its targets, LaPorta lands nearer eleventh than sixth, and that costs you about two a week, which is roughly nobody's season. Watch his first-half target count Sunday. At the table I'm taking LaPorta and Warren, both tagged Questionable on the same board. That tag is the one thing standing between me and those two prices, so I read Friday's report before I bid either of them.
I'll let somebody else pay $29 for the second-best number in the group. The full Week 1 tight end board sits at /fantasy/nfl/rankings. Our published picks for Week 1 games are at /picks/nfl. Sunday's player-prop lines, tight ends included, are at /player-props?sport=nfl.
And the futures page in this same batch runs the same stake-sizing arithmetic these dollars get drafted against: NFL futures portfolio 2026.
