KC · TE
Travis Kelce Fantasy Outlook 2026: He Finished TE3 By Showing Up
Kelce was the third-best fantasy tight end last season and ninth by per-game scoring. The difference between those two numbers is the entire case for drafting him.
Two rankings, one player
Travis Kelce finished as the third-best fantasy tight end in 2025 with 193.2 points. He also finished ninth at the position in points per game, at 11.4.
Both are true, and the gap between them is not a paradox — it is the whole product. He played 17 games at age 35 while the tight ends around him missed time, and availability at a position this thin is worth more than a couple of extra points a week.
He did it on a career-low 19.6% target share, the smallest slice of his team's passing game since 2014, which tells you the production came from role security rather than volume growth.
This is not a player who wins you weeks anymore. What he does is refuse to lose them by absence.
The props were low on him again
Sportsbooks posted him at 700.5 receiving yards, roughly 56 receptions, and 4.5 receiving touchdowns before last season. He delivered 851 yards, 76 catches, and five scores, clearing all three.
This year the market has him at 162.0 implied PPR points and our board puts him 92 overall. ESPN sits at 101. The draft room does not take him until 81.7, which is roughly 10 picks later than our projection, and our value model puts his fair pick at 82.
What you are actually buying
Be clear about the shape of it. Eight of his 17 games last season came in under 10 PPR points and only two cleared 20, with a 24.1-point high in Week 11. This is not a player who wins you weeks anymore.
What he does is refuse to lose them by absence. At a position where the replacement option is frequently a tight end who posts single digits and then misses three games, a floor of five or six points every single week has real value, and it is available in the ninth round rather than the fourth.
Ten straight top-five positional finishes is the kind of streak that ends without warning, and at 35 the base rate for that is higher than it has ever been. The counterweight is that the market has already priced substantial decline: 162.0 implied points is a fraction of what his projections looked like three years ago.
Draft him as TE3 with confidence in the showing up model
He is the answer to a specific question, which is what to do at tight end when you have spent your early picks elsewhere. Taking him around 81.7 costs you nothing you wanted and removes a hole from your lineup for the season.