Gathering everyone's responses to questions following our annual Experts Draft this week, I was surprised by how many times David Njoku was mentioned as a steal. I honestly hadn't thought too much about the Cleveland tight end, but others definitely are.
Rather quietly Njoku was the No. 11 PPR tight end last year. But if you went only by the five games he played with Deshaun Watson, projected out over a full season, he'd have been even better than that.
Table shows Njoku's numbers with Watson (projected over a full season's worth of games). In terms of catches and yards, he was actually similar on a per-game basis with Jacoby Brissett, but he caught only 2 TDs in those nine games (and then 2 TDs in five games with Watson). And if we allow that Watson will probably be better this season, having not sat out the previous year and a half, it's reasonable to say that Njoku could be even more productive.
I'm not saying he's going to be the No. 6 tight end this season, but there's that kind of upside, potentially, if Watson and he are able to stay in the lineup all season.
TIGHT ENDS, 2022 (PPR) | ||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Player | Tgt | No | Yds | TD | PPR | Rk |
Travis Kelce | 152 | 110 | 1338 | 12 | 318.3 | 1 |
T.J. Hockenson | 129 | 86 | 914 | 6 | 217.4 | 2 |
George Kittle | 86 | 60 | 765 | 11 | 202.5 | 3 |
Mark Andrews | 113 | 73 | 847 | 5 | 190.5 | 4 |
Evan Engram | 98 | 73 | 766 | 4 | 176.9 | 5 |
Njoku(proj.) | 95 | 58 | 558 | 7 | 154.4 | 6 |
Tyler Higbee | 108 | 72 | 620 | 3 | 152.0 | 7 |
Taysom Hill | 13 | 9 | 77 | 9 | 148.2 | 8 |
Pat Freiermuth | 98 | 63 | 732 | 2 | 148.2 | 9 |
Cole Kmet | 69 | 50 | 544 | 7 | 147.3 | 10 |
Dalton Schultz | 89 | 57 | 577 | 5 | 144.7 | 11 |
Dallas Goedert | 69 | 55 | 702 | 3 | 143.2 | 12 |
Gerald Everett | 87 | 58 | 555 | 4 | 139.5 | 13 |
Dawson Knox | 65 | 48 | 517 | 6 | 135.7 | 14 |
Juwan Johnson | 65 | 42 | 508 | 7 | 134.8 | 15 |
Tyler Conklin | 87 | 58 | 552 | 3 | 131.5 | 16 |
Noah Fant | 63 | 50 | 486 | 4 | 122.6 | 17 |
Jordan Akins | 54 | 37 | 495 | 5 | 118.5 | 18 |
Zach Ertz | 69 | 47 | 406 | 4 | 115.6 | 19 |
Robert Tonyan | 67 | 53 | 470 | 2 | 112.0 | 20 |
In the draft, Njoku was the 11th tight end taken, selected in the 11th round. Sounds like a lot of people believe he'll outperform that this year.
--Andy Richardson