Receiving TE Ratings — Season 2025
A descriptive composite of every qualified tight end’s receiving production: target volume, air-yards share, QB-decoupled efficiency, and yards per game. Each component is z-scored within the season and equally weighted. Receiving only — blocking is intentionally out of scope (see the methodology section).
| # | Score | Player | Team | G | Tgt | Yds | Y/G |
|---|
Why receiving-only — the blocking-data gap
An honest TE rating wants both halves of the job: receiving production and run/pass blocking. We score only the first half. The reason is a data gap, not a design choice. Public NFL data sources — nflverse, Next Gen Stats public, FTN charting — do not publish per-player TE block grades. PFF and Sports Info Solutions track this, but their data feeds are paywalled at price points that don’t fit a descriptive publication-only product.
We considered building a snap-count-based blocking proxy (offense snaps minus estimated routes), but in testing it ranked backup blocking TEs above Kelce, Kittle, and Goedert — all elite block-and-catch players. The proxy was confounded with backup-TE role and would have made the rating worse, not more honest. So we scope to receiving and label the page accordingly.
Reactivation trigger: if PFF or SIS block-grade feeds become available, we’ll add a 5th composite component and rebuild as a full TE rater. Until then, treat this as the receiving half of a real TE evaluation.
What this rating is (and isn’t)
What it is: a transparent four-component composite that scores each qualified TE’s receiving season on volume (target share), depth-of-target (air-yards share), QB-decoupled efficiency (per-target EPA residualized against the QB’s independent value), and absolute production (yards per game). Equal-weight z-scores within season so league- wide passing-rate shifts don’t pull numbers around year over year.
What it isn’t: a complete TE rating (no blocking, see above) and not a betting projection. Sportsbook TE prop markets are among the thinnest in football and the model’s lift over naive baselines, while measurable, doesn’t clear the −110 vig.
EPA/T* = per-target EPA after subtracting the QB’s team-season passing-EPA contribution. TEs catching from a backup-QB stretch (Andrews 2022 Huntley, McBride 2024 McSorley spot start) get credit for the QB context.