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2026 Fantasy TE Rankings

The top 24 TEs for 2026 half-PPR leagues, ranked by our machine-learning model's projected fantasy points. Each projection comes with a calibrated 80% confidence interval — meaning 83% of actual outcomes fell inside our intervals in 2025 walk-forward testing.

📊 Model: CatBoost ensemble + CQR 🎯 Validation: walk-forward on 2019-2025 📅 Scoring: half-PPR 🔄 Updated: April 30, 2026

Tight end is the highest-variance fantasy position. Most years, a handful of TEs produce and the rest are streamers. Our model cuts TE MAE by 37% vs ADP — and the TE R² lift is one of the largest of any position (0.56 vs 0.03, a 20× improvement).

Rank Player Team Proj Pts 80% CI ADP Risk
TE1 Trey McBride ARI 130.8 49–212 26 LOW
TE2 Brock Bowers LV 93.6 27–160 18 LOW
TE3 Travis Kelce KC 89.1 46–132 70 LOW
TE4 George Kittle SF 88.5 40–137 39 LOW
TE5 Jonnu Smith PIT 79.9 25–135 118 LOW
TE6 Tucker Kraft GB 75.2 22–128 108 LOW
TE7 Dalton Kincaid BUF 73.9 25–122 127 LOW
TE8 Kenyon Sadiq NYJ 73.9 0–183 0 MED
TE9 Zach Ertz WAS 73.2 29–118 164 LOW
TE10 Hunter Henry NE 72.4 1–143 154 LOW
TE11 Kyle Pitts ATL 71.7 16–128 140 LOW
TE12 Mark Andrews BAL 69.1 28–110 88 LOW
TE13 Dallas Goedert PHI 66.1 0–134 142 LOW
TE14 Sam LaPorta DET 65.3 17–113 58 LOW
TE15 Colston Loveland CHI 63.9 0–166 116 MED
TE16 Jake Ferguson DAL 63.8 40–87 124 LOW
TE17 Tyler Warren IND 62.9 0–161 96 MED
TE18 T.J. Hockenson MIN 59.1 5–113 68 LOW
TE19 Pat Freiermuth PIT 58.0 17–99 LOW
TE20 Chig Okonkwo WAS 58.0 7–109 LOW
TE21 Quentin Moore WAS 57.9 0–164 0 MED
TE22 Dalton Schultz HOU 57.4 4–110 LOW
TE23 Evan Engram DEN 56.7 5–108 91 LOW
TE24 Juwan Johnson NO 54.8 0–115 MED

How to read this table

Proj Pts: half-PPR fantasy points our model expects over the full 2026 season. 80% CI: the interval 80% of actual outcomes should fall inside, based on 2025 calibration. A wide CI means more uncertainty — injury-prone players and rookies have wider intervals. ADP: half-PPR consensus average draft position from Fantasy Football Calculator. Risk: relative coefficient of variation (CI width / projection) bucketed into position quartiles.

What the model gets right that ADP misses

ADP is a wisdom-of-the-crowd signal — it reflects what drafters collectively think, not what actually happens. In our 2022-2025 walk-forward validation, consensus ADP explained only 6% of actual fantasy-point variance. Our model explained 57% — roughly 9× more variance explained.

The biggest gaps between model and ADP are surfaced on our Top Sleepers and Top Busts pages. The full War Room shows every player with filtering, VBD, scarcity, and draft-tracking.

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