Upon Further Review: Welcome To The Tight End Renaissance, Which Has Been In The Making

Look in the end zone of an NFL game this weekend, and there was a decent chance a tight end was celebrating. There were 20 touchdowns caught by tight ends Sunday, the most on any single day in NFL history. The Las Vegas Raiders’ win over the New Orleans Saints was a gluttony of TE TDs, with four tight ends combining for six total touchdown catches. “I think it’s amazing,” Saints tight end Juwan Johnson, who caught two touchdowns on Sunday, told me. “I think it’s a true dedication to what guys have done in the offseason. It is a mental drain that you’re blocking some of the best edge rushers in the game, corners, safeties, linebackers, but then you’re asked to go out there and run around and catch a ball. Sometimes, you can get into the end zone.” The Saints ultimately lost when Raiders tight end Brock Bowers caught a touchdown with 6:22 left, as teammate Michael Mayer had earlier in the day. And Johnson wasn’t the only Saints tight end with multiple scores on Sunday, either. Noah Fant also had two touchdown grabs in New Orleans’ loss. The NFL is enjoying a Tight End Renaissance, and the numbers may surprise you. In 2024, tight ends totaled 178 touchdowns across the league, accounting for 22% of all passing touchdowns. Last year, that number grew to 231 touchdowns — a 30% increase — and accounted for 28% of all passing touchdowns. It’s a small sample, but three weeks into the 2026 season, NFL tight ends are on pace for 289 touchdowns — that’s 62% more than two years ago, and a 32% share of all TD passes. The rise of 12 personnel — with two tight ends and two receivers — got headlines last year, with offenses liking a look that didn’t easily point to an obvious run or pass, setting up mismatches downfield. Offenses used 12 personnel in nearly a quarter of their snaps in 2024 (22.1%) and again in 2025 (22.1%), per FOX Sports Research. “You have teams who made a big jump, like the Rams paved the way for a lot of ways to know the opportunities of what it can be,” Johnson told me. “You have teams with a West Coast offense like [Raiders head coach Klint] Kubiak, [San Francisco 49ers head coach Kyle] Shanahan, guys in Seattle who are running a majority of 12 personnel. The way they operate with tight ends — it’s encouraged a lot of coordinators to do the same. We’ve piggybacked off that, and it’s been really good to show that.” The ascending value of tight ends was evident in this year’s draft, when nine were taken in the first three rounds — up from just three in 2024. You’re seeing it in lucrative contracts as well — the Raiders gave Mayer, their No. 2 tight end, a three-year, $45 million extension this summer, making him the league’s sixth-highest-paid tight end. The NFL already has four tight ends with three touchdowns in three weeks, showing promise of bigger season-long production. George Kittle is among that group, logging two touchdown grabs on Sunday as he continues his miraculous rehab from an Achilles tear. Johnson, Fant and Dallas Cowboys standout Jake Ferguson are the others with three touchdown grabs already this year. However, only twice in the last decade has a tight end gotten 12 touchdowns or more in a season (Eric Ebron in 2018; Travis Kelce in 2022), but this could get back to the Rob Gronkowski/Jimmy Graham/Vernon Davis heyday of 2009-15, when there were 10 such seasons. Tight ends led the league in touchdown catches three times in a span of five years during that stretch, which may never happen again. The Saints had as many tight end touchdowns Sunday as they did in all of 2025, but Johnson said he doesn’t keep track of how tight ends across the league are doing, though he has someone else on the lookout for him. “To be very honest, I had no idea,” Johnson said. “The person who tells me about any of this stuff is my wife [Chanen]. She’ll update me: ‘He did this. He did that.’ The more that I’ve played football, she’s fallen in love with watching football, and it’s something we can bond over. At the end of the day, these guys are my friends, too, so I’m confident that a lot of these guys will do well. We have a lot of great, explosive, elusive tight ends in this game, so whenever they do something positive, it’s not a shock to me.” As much as we make a point of the importance of keeping your starting quarterback healthy, the first three weeks of the NFL season haven’t exactly illustrated that yet. Six teams have had to start quarterbacks other than their Week 1 starter, and those teams are 6-0 in those games, including Case Keenum’s big win Monday night for the Bears. Those six (Keenum, Atlanta’s Michael Penix, Minnesota’s Carson Wentz, the Giants’ Jameis Winston, Seattle’s Drew Lock and Washington’s Marcus Mariota) have thrown for 14 touchdowns and only two interceptions. The same teams that are 6-0 with a second quarterback are a combined 5-7 with their Week 1 starters, with 14 touchdowns and nine interceptions from those quarterbacks. The Vikings’ aggressive defense is a huge part of why they’re 3-0 to start the season, with defensive coordinator Brian Flores blitzing much more than any other defense in the league. They’ve blitzed on 68.4% of their opponents’ dropbacks, which is over 20% higher than the team in second (New England Patriots, 45.2%), per Sharp Football Analytics. With all of that blitzing, the Vikings have a league-best 14 sacks, rank second in scoring defense and first in third-down and red-zone defense. What’s underappreciated is how much opponents are resorting to penalties to avoid even more sacks. Through three games, the Vikings have the best penalty differential in the league — opponents have 13 more penalties for 102 more penalty yards than Minnesota does. They’ve forced opponents into four false starts and eight holding penalties. Tampa Bay struggled to contain Minnesota’s defense on Sunday, going 0-for-9 on third downs. The Buccaneers’ average third-down distance was 14 yards for first downs. Penalties pushed them into a first-and-27 and, separately, a third-and-29 and third-and-36, so that league-leading sack total could actually be much higher. How strange is it that the first two rookie quarterbacks to take snaps this season were both … undrafted? First, Atlanta’s Jack Strand played as a function of the Falcons’ injury issues, and now the Buccaneers will turn to Jalon Daniels with Baker Mayfield injured. Fernando Mendoza, the Raiders’ No. 1 overall pick, has yet to take a snap with Kirk Cousins guiding Las Vegas to a surprising 3-0 start. Undrafted rookie quarterbacks generally have a rough time — over the last two years, they’ve combined for a 1-5 record as starters, two touchdowns and 12 interceptions. The best recent examples were the Giants’ Tommy DeVito and the Bears’ Tyson Bagent in 2023, who went a combined 5-5 with 11 touchdowns against nine interceptions. When was the last time that the first two rookie quarterbacks to play were undrafted? That looks like 2000, when Doug Johnson played for the Falcons and Clint Stoerner for the Cowboys in the first four weeks. Throw in the draft picks from that year, and those rookies went on to win seven Super Bowls.