McBride Leads Inaugural Travis Ratings

NFL Draft – Trey McBride of Colorado State is the clear leader among this year’s tight end prospects, according to Football Outsiders’ new Travis projections for college tight ends. But he falls far short of the top receiving tight end prospects of the last 20 years.

Yes, it’s time to introduce another Football Outsiders rookie projection system to join our usual lineup of QBASE, BackCAST, Playmaker Score, and SackSEER. Our new system projects receiving yardage for tight ends and I’m calling it Travis. That stands for:

Tight end Receiving Value System

I could capitalize it something like TRaViS but I decided that looks weird so we’ll go with just “Travis” for now. You know who it is named after, although the system didn’t exactly do a great job of picking out Mr. Kelce as a sleeper prospect. We’ll get to that in a minute.

As always, Football Outsiders’ 2022 NFL draft coverage is presented by Underdog Fantasy!

Here is a look at the Travis scores for this year’s tight end prospects. Each Travis score represents a projection of how many receiving yards that player will gain per year through his first five NFL seasons, i.e. the same output as Playmaker Score.

This is not a good historical year for tight end prospects. Most years will have at least one prospect over 400 yards. For this season, we just have McBride close to that and then a big drop to the next set of prospects.

The main element in the Travis scores is projected draft position. For most of the data, I used NFL Draft Scout’s projected rounds, similar to how projected draft position is used in SackSEER and Playmaker Score. In recent years, we used instead a translation of the player’s rank on the Scouts Inc. big board on ESPN+. Tight ends projected to go in the top three rounds get more of a boost. Historically, pre-draft ratings have done a pretty good job of judging which tight ends would be successful in the NFL.

The second element in Travis is the player’s best season in receiving yardage divided by total team pass attempts. Again, this is similar to Playmaker Score. Greg Dulcich’s 725 yards on 335 total UCLA passes is more impressive than Charlie Jolar’s 756 yards on 444 Iowa State passes. (Greg Dulcich’s moustache is even more impressive than his 725 receiving yards.) McBride and Isaiah Likely had the best scores in this metric last season.

The next element is something we don’t use in Playmaker Score: 40-yard dash time. I used pro day times for players who didn’t run at the combine. For wide receivers, we don’t use 40 time because it ends up predicting success for the same players who do well in the other elements of Playmaker Score (yards per team pass attempt, rushing attempts, etc.). For tight ends, using 40 times did improve accuracy of Travis. McBride had the most impressive 40 this year with 4.56 at his pro day. Jelani Woods of Virginia had 4.61.

The final element of Travis is age under 23 as of September 1 of the player’s rookie year. Particularly young players have a better track record of development beyond their college performnaces. This seems to even out around age 23, which is the typical age for a player who was in college for four seasons. I used age instead of a player’s class (junior, sophomore, etc.) because COVID has made figuring out what class a player is in a bit complicated. Daniel Bellinger gets a bit of a boost as the youngest member of this year’s tight end draft class.

The big surprise here is that touchdowns didn’t come out as a significant variable in predicting NFL success for tight ends. No matter whether I made the dependent variable total yardage or total fantasy points, touchdowns did not come out as significant, so you won’t find them in the Travis projection equation.

Here’s a look at the top tight end prospects of the last 20 years according to Travis scores. Most of these players were first-round picks. Ben Troupe, who went in the second round, 40th overall to the Titans in 2004, stands out as a bust, although current Cleveland tight end David Njoku has certainly been disappointing.

Since “projected draft position” is the most important variable in Travis, obviously the system is going to give the best forecast to prospective first-round picks. Most of the players on that list of Top Travis Scores won’t surprise anyone. What about players who went later in the draft? Players that Travis projected better than their actual draft position are highlighted by Jason Witten (a third-round selection with a Travis of 462), Jared Cook (392), Aaron Hernandez (313), and Ben Utecht (Travis of 153 despite going undrafted). Of course, there were also misses. Anybody a fan of 2019 seventh-round pick Caleb Wilson around here? He had a Travis of 179 and has zero NFL yards. High picks that had somewhat lukewarm projections from Travis included Jerramy Stevens, John Carlson, Gavin Escobar, and Richard Quinn. Similar to a lot of Football Outsiders’ projection systems for rookies, Travis appears to be a little better at picking out busts than picking out sleepers.

Travis Kelce, the namesake of the system, had a Travis projection of 287, right between Austin Hooper and Jimmy Graham. So, that one was a miss.