What in the tight end?

Currently there are seven tight ends on the roster and that should be all of the tight ends unless I’m missing something. Last year there were 5 tight ends, although you could argue that Matthew Young and Charles Robinson were really H-back’s rather than tight ends. The 2023 list:

That’s two players that have moved on, Young and Cupp and I think it would be fair to say that Cupp and Tharp received most of the snaps last year. Tharp only played in 8 games and Cupp played in 12 so for a decent part of the year only 1 tight end was truly healthy. And even though Tharp played in 8 games, he had 18 receptions for 178 yards and 4 touchdowns to Cupp’s 11 receptions for 114 yards and 2 touchdowns. Based on the recruiting for this year, the offense maybe couldn’t be what it wanted to be without two healthy tight ends?

The list of tight ends for 2024 is as follows:

I’ve also ordered them a bit so that you can see that there are basically 2 tight ends in the senior, junior, and sophomore classes with just Jackson in the freshman class. It appears that McGuire, Blanchard, Kittley, & Cochran have a plan in that they want to always have the opportunity to run 2-tight end sets whenever they want. And not just blocking tight ends, but tight ends that can catch. At the very least, we can probably say that Jackson will redshirt and he’ll need to add weight. He participated in the dunk contest, jumping over a couple of players on his way to a pretty terrific dunk so I definitely think he falls into that dynamic athlete category, but at 215 he’ll have to work on his size.

I also think it is safe to say that Robinson will continue to be an H-back so we won’t really count him.

In the grand scheme of things, it would seem that the offense will see a decent dose of Tharp, Conyers, Llewellyn and Miller, giving Kittley the option of running a 2-tight end set whenever he wants.

And this is pure speculation, but as long as you realize that it’s speculation, but we know that Joey McGuire is a Dallas Cowboys fan and we also know he’s a Patrick Mahomes fan. He seems like the sort of guy that watches those games because we can’t be business 24/7. Both of those offenses feature not just any sort of tight end, but a dynamic tight end that breaks the seams and makes plays. Jake Ferguson for the Cowboys had 40 catches and 5 touchdowns (and maybe the only player who had a good game against Green Bay) while Travis Kelce has had a bit of a down year (he is 34 years old), but he caught 93 passes and 984 yards with 5 touchdowns. And it’s not just Dallas and Kansas City, the NFL is littered with tight ends that are dynamic and not just blockers (Detroit and LaPorta, San Francisco and Kittle, Andrews and Baltimore We like to think about these tight ends as being the type of player that can change the math on how defenses play the receivers and with all of these options it seems like Kittley wants to do the same thing. Conyers caught 30 passes for 362 yards along with 22 rushing attempts. Miller had 25 for 453 and 4 touchdowns last year. I don’t think that they came here to do less things and there’s no part of me that thinks that Kittley wants to run a slow-it-down offense and wants to utilize Tahj Brooks, but I do think that as a staff, they wanted the option to run 2-tight ends and recruit players who are exhibited.