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TE Kyle Pitts, ATL (3 Viewers)

Dr. Octopus said:
JohnnyU said:
cough...cough...really?  My advice is to not play that card.  You think his 40 time matters relative to other WRs?  You don't think he will be a matchup nightmare?  OMG, please don't play that card.
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I think his point is that at TE size Pitts is still faster than the average NFL WR. I think he was showing it as a positive.
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I think Johnny may still be a little salty about Super Bowl III.

 
Dr. Octopus said:
Can’t you say any rookie that you draft with a high first round pick has their value priced in already?
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A lot of times rookies do have assymetrical downside. Especially when rookie fever pumps then up way too high. 

It's all relative to what you have to pay to acquire the pick/rookie.  It's not every rookie, it really comes down to the community perception and where they draft a player. Some rookies have assymetrical upside, and you want those because they are better bets.  Trey Lance might be in that spot right now. 

If you could pinpoint the range of outcomes and the chances of reaching them you'd arrive at a pretty clear point at which you could say a draft pick is a good bet or not. 

Usually the value play is trading out of an overhyped player with assymetrical downside and acquiring two players with assymetrical upside.  

 
kittenmittens said:
A lot of times rookies do have assymetrical downside. Especially when rookie fever pumps then up way too high. 

It's all relative to what you have to pay to acquire the pick/rookie.  It's not every rookie, it really comes down to the community perception and where they draft a player. Some rookies have assymetrical upside, and you want those because they are better bets.  Trey Lance might be in that spot right now. 

If you could pinpoint the range of outcomes and the chances of reaching them you'd arrive at a pretty clear point at which you could say a draft pick is a good bet or not. 

Usually the value play is trading out of an overhyped player with assymetrical downside and acquiring two players with assymetrical upside.  
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I think you're getting your head too deep into the math here and are losing sight of the actual game.

A 4th round startup pick at a position completely devoid of young difference makers still has a ton of meat on the bone when it comes to potential upside.

A guy like Zeke who was a mid 1st round startup pick had a whooollllleeee lot less potential upside but that aren't a lot of folks walking around pumping their chest about trading down for Corey Coleman and Kenneth Dixon because they had more potential upside relative to their value.

 
FreeBaGeL said:
I think you're getting your head too deep into the math here and are losing sight of the actual game.

A 4th round startup pick at a position completely devoid of young difference makers still has a ton of meat on the bone when it comes to potential upside.

A guy like Zeke who was a mid 1st round startup pick had a whooollllleeee lot less potential upside but that aren't a lot of folks walking around pumping their chest about trading down for Corey Coleman and Kenneth Dixon because they had more potential upside relative to their value.
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I think a lot of the actual game is figuring out the answer to the question of who is overvalued and undervalued by the trade and adp market?

 
Andy Dufresne said:
It's all guesswork though.
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So is everything.  You're just trying to guess better than the next guy. 

Part of it is also realizing it's guess work and taking two shots instead of one. 

Counter cherry pick for the Zeke example, what about trading out of N'Keal harry and getting both AJB and Metcalf. 

 
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kittenmittens said:
So is everything.  You're just trying to guess better than the next guy 
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I just mean you're not figuring out out as much as you're lucking out - particularly with the guys you think are undervalued.

But I do advocate just deciding on which guys you want and then figure out the best way to get them - "value" be darned. Within reason of course - you shouldn't take Demetric Felton first overall.

 
kittenmittens said:
So is everything.  You're just trying to guess better than the next guy. 

Part of it is also realizing it's guess work and taking two shots instead of one. 

Counter cherry pick for the Zeke example, what about trading out of N'Keal harry and getting both AJB and Metcalf. 
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N'Keal Harry was a 7th round startup pick as a rookie (AJB only a round later in the 8th) so if anything he fits the mold of what you're looking for with a lot of untapped potential upside.

Again, I think where we (drastically) differ on this is that you seem to have this notion that a player being ranked highly within some arbitrary subset is upside limiting even if his overall value has plenty of upside still untapped.  IE Pitts being a top 3 dynasty TE already means he lacks upside because he's already a top 3 dynasty TE.  But that doesn't really explain it because he's still a 4th round startup pick overall and that leaves plenty of upside.  Who cares if he can only go from TE3 to TE1 or TE2 to TE1?  Those are just arbitrary numbers his value will increase massively if he hits.

Again, it's no different than saying any 1.01 rookie has no upside because he can't ever be ranked higher against other people from his rookie class than #1.  It's a silly distinction because obviously Najee Harris' value can still increase even if he's picked 1.01.  1.01 means nothing in the context of his value against all players just as TE2 or TE3 doesn't.

Saying Pitts is already priced at his upside just seems kind of silly to me.  If this dude is a 23 year old Gronk a couple years from now his value will be exponentially higher than it is right now.

 
Sorry if this has been discussed, but...

Has there been any talk about moving Pitts to WR? And, what happens to his FF value if that were to happen?

 
Andy Dufresne said:
It's all guesswork though.
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I would like to believe it is informed and educated guesswork. But I mean of course it is guesswork. It isn't just luck though. Good process creates opportunities to get lucky. And leveraging one's experience and knowledge in order to make informed and educated gut decisions re: buying low and selling high *is* good process. 

If you're better at it than your leaguemates then you should be coming out ahead. If I am winning year after year is it because I am luckier than average? 

I don't agree with Mittens take on Pitts but I don't think his rationale is flawed.

 
barackdhouse said:
I would like to believe it is informed and educated guesswork. But I mean of course it is guesswork. It isn't just luck though. Good process creates opportunities to get lucky. And leveraging one's experience and knowledge in order to make informed and educated gut decisions re: buying low and selling high *is* good process. 

If you're better at it than your leaguemates then you should be coming out ahead. If I am winning year after year is it because I am luckier than average? 

I don't agree with Mittens take on Pitts but I don't think his rationale is flawed.
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I didn't mean to say it's all luck. Yes, you have your guys that you think might pan out.

I have used $1 blind bidding wins to get Tyreek Hill, Phillip Lindsay, and most recently James Robinson. I would never walk around crowing "I KNEW it!" about those wins though.

Anyway, I get what's being said. But like @FreeBaGeL I don't agree with it. 

 
FreeBaGeL said:
Saying Pitts is already priced at his upside just seems kind of silly to me.  If this dude is a 23 year old Gronk a couple years from now his value will be exponentially higher than it is right now.
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I'm not saying that.  The arguments that say "but he has so much to gain" and leave out what he might have to lose - and the odds of each outcome happening - are how he got so overvalued in the first place.  Of course he could gain a ton of value, but what are the chances of that?  Of course he could go to zero, but what are the chances of that?  And everything in between.  

Just like Jordan said on the podcast, we are setting up expectations he is very unlikely to meet. 

I appreciate the debates here.  Good stuff guys. 

 
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moleculo said:
Sorry if this has been discussed, but...

Has there been any talk about moving Pitts to WR? And, what happens to his FF value if that were to happen?
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Just one guy guessing here.  

I haven't read anything talking about NFL teams wanting to move him.  From a financial standpoint, it is in their best interest to keep him at TE.  

The league hosting sites will not arbitrarily change him, there would be Twitter riots.  Lot of guys wearing backwards baseball caps on podcasts would have hot takes.  

If I was Pitts agent, I would already be preparing the case when it comes time to exercise the 5th year option that he IS a WR.  Terrell Suggs I think went through this when he was getting tagged as a LB, and he was being deployed as a DE. I think they split the difference.  

I would not be surprised if that happened.  

 
moleculo said:
Sorry if this has been discussed, but...

Has there been any talk about moving Pitts to WR? And, what happens to his FF value if that were to happen?
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The Jimmy Graham case was referenced earlier in the thread and, while anything is possible, I think it makes it very unlikely.

To summarize Graham took 70% of his snaps from the slot, 30% inline.  The arbitrator ruled that any snap taken in the slot but within 4 yards of the offensive tackle still constitutes as a snap in the traditional tight end position.  Even with that extremely loose definition Graham still lined up as a WR 50% of the time (meaning not just in the slot, but more than 4 yards away from the OT) and he was still deemed a TE by the league.

 
fair enough.

Hypothetically speaking, if he were a WR, where do y'all rank him amongst WR's?  trying to gauge NFL value.

 
moleculo said:
fair enough.

Hypothetically speaking, if he were a WR, where do y'all rank him amongst WR's?  trying to gauge NFL value.
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Most places have him as number one or two, at the worst three. He's way more than likely to be one of the first three pass catchers picked, if not the first. But his ability to create mismatches comes from the fact that he lines up tight end, if that makes any sense.

 
I think the only way he would get designated as a WR is if the team that drafts him announces he'd be a WR as I've heard some teams do have him on their draft board at WR. But this does seem unlikely.

 
Twenty-Four Eighty-Four said:
I think the only way he would get designated as a WR is if the team that drafts him announces he'd be a WR as I've heard some teams do have him on their draft board at WR. But this does seem unlikely.
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There is zero incentive for a team to designate him as a WR.

 
Speed, strength and smarts: why Kyle Pitts is a near perfect NFL prospect

As athletes have become bigger, faster and stronger, the term “unicorn” has become deeply rooted in the sports lexicon.

In fact, it’s now chucked around with such ease that it’s in danger of losing all meaning. The unicorns are supposed to be the one-offs. The physical “freaks”. The world-class athletes who do things that other world-class athletes can only dream about.

When it comes to Kyle Pitts, even a Council of Unicorns would admit the Florida tight end is special.

Pitts represents the natural endpoint of the NFL’s latest cycle. Cast your mind back as recently as two decades ago and game-changing tight ends were a rarity. Tight ends used to serve one function: acting as an extra blocker. Occasionally, one would pop up who could both block and receive. He would be treated to 30 or so catch attempts a season and be hailed as a revolutionary.

Now, tight ends are the name of the game. The NFL is a matchup league, and if you can find a player big enough to block and nimble enough to serve as a threat in the passing game, you have a true mismatch. Linebackers are too slow to cover them in space; cornerbacks and safeties are too small to bring them down.

Rob Gronkowski. Travis Kelce. Jimmy Graham. Antonio Gates. Greg Olsen. The past decade has been the era of the tight end, from New England’s famed two tight-end system at the start of the 2010s to this past season, when 30% of the personnel packages across the league featured two or more tight ends, the highest such figure since NFL Next Gen Stats started tracking the data.

Now, along rolls Pitts, the most athletic tight end prospect in history. Run through his numbers and you’d be right to wonder whether you had stumbled across Captain America. Pitts is 6ft 6in, with the hops of a receiver and the wingspan of a Boeing 747. Here is how he stacks up among all tight ends in the crucial pre-draft height-weight-speed measurements since the numbers started to be recorded in 1975:

80th percentile for height

98th percentile for wingspan

93rd percentile for hand size

98th percentile for the 40-yard dash

95th percentile for his 20-yard split

97th percentile for his broad jump.

For context: Pitts’s figures easily surpass those of Gronkowski, Kelce and Tony Gonzalez, the three finest tight ends of the modern era, per Mockdraftable.

Pitts is more of an out-and-out receiver than a blocker. In last year’s pandemic shortened college football season, he was dominant, posting 43 receptions, 770 yards and 12 touchdowns in just eight games.

It’s best not to even think of Pitts as a tight end, in truth. Teams no longer focus on positional designations and instead look at the skillsets of players and where they fit into the overall structure of a scheme. Lance Zierlein of NFL Media has compared Pitts to Calvin Johnson, the legendary Lions wide receiver, such is his threat potency as an outside threat. But, like all of the league’s best flex pieces, Pitts is also good enough as a blocker to be treated as a true tight end in the Gronkowski-Kelce vintage by opposing defenses.

By the time draft night rolls around next week, Pitts will most likely be the highest tight end ever selected. Vernon Davis was drafted sixth overall in 2006 and Kellen Winslow II was selected in the same slot two years earlier. But that was at the start of the revolution, when drafting tight ends in the top 10 was still viewed as a poor use of resources. Now, selecting a tight end ahead of a running back or off-ball linebacker is viewed as the smart play.

Teams inside and outside the top five are circling. Quarterbacks will go off the board with the first three picks to Jacksonville (Trevor Lawrence), New York (Zach Wilson) and San Francisco (any one of three candidates). After that, every team will have Pitts at least in their thoughts.

Pitts is indeed special. Football can be a story of complex schemes and assignments. Pitts makes it easy: he can reach his arms to spots defenders his size cannot. And he is usually quicker than anyone a defense dare line-up across from him. The only answer for a defensive coordinator is to send a second defender or to run a complicated ‘cone’ coverage that relies on three defenders keeping an eye on one receiver. Whichever way you dress it up, it compromises the defensive coverage.

A buzzword in football in recent years is “flexibility”. Coaches are sticking less to a unified doctrine and focusing more on the ability to run a little bit of everything from every look imaginable.

Pre-snap movement and motions are at an all-time high: the offense showing one look to the defense before shifting to another just before the ball is snapped. The hope is to have the defense reveal its hand before the ball makes its way to the quarterback, eliminating the need for complex reads. All of those old-school, intricate designs are still at work, but more and more of the league is falling into the see-it-throw-it school of thought.

To run such a system you need moveable pieces. You need players that force the defense to commit two or three (at least with their eyes) defenders at a time. You need a Tyreek Hill or a Travis Kelce or a Mike Evans or a Christian McCaffrey. You need uncommon size or speed or a combination of both. You need a player who is as comfortable isolated on one side of the field as he is stacked up in close quarters; who can move from the backfield to the perimeter on any given snap; who can serve as the focal point of the offense and help reveal coverages for the quarterback.

You need, in essence, a Kyle Pitts.

There are never any certainties in the draft. But Pitts is about as close to a sure thing as you can find.
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KYLE PITTS TE, FLORIDA GATORS

NFL Network's Ian Rapoport hears that the Dallas Cowboys "aren't expected" to trade up from the No. 10 pick.

While Dallas is one team (one of many) that loves Florida TE Kyle Pitts -- Cowboys owner Jerry Jones is reportedly "infatuated" with the star playmaker -- Rapoport's little birdies are indicating that the Cowboys have no plans to move up. Not for Pitts and not for anybody else, either. In mock draft action, we have widely seen Dallas projected to take a cornerback with its first-round pick, either Alabama's Patrick Surtain Jr. or South Carolina's Jaycee Horn. This makes far, far more sense for the Dallas roster than a Pitts selection, as the Cowboys already possess one of the best passing offenses in the NFL assuming that QB Dak Prescott has no issues coming back from the severe ankle injury he sustained in the fall.

SOURCE: Ian Rapoport on Twitter

Apr 23, 2021, 1:51 PM ET
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Faust said:
Here is how he stacks up among all tight ends in the crucial pre-draft height-weight-speed measurements since the numbers started to be recorded in 1975:
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Let's go ahead and compare him to every human since recorded time, that's just about as relevant.

Tell me how he stacks up to all the TEs taken in the past decade and I might be willing to listen.

 
tangfoot said:
Let's go ahead and compare him to every human since recorded time, that's just about as relevant.

Tell me how he stacks up to all the TEs taken in the past decade and I might be willing to listen.
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"For context: Pitts’s figures easily surpass those of Gronkowski, Kelce and Tony Gonzalez, the three finest tight ends of the modern era, per Mockdraftable."

 
Andy Dufresne said:
"For context: Pitts’s figures easily surpass those of Gronkowski, Kelce and Tony Gonzalez, the three finest tight ends of the modern era, per Mockdraftable."
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Athletically, I've heard he's almost identical to Albert O.  So we have that going for us, which is nice.

 
The way the hype machine is going, anything less than 100-1300-12 in his rookie year is going to be a universal disappointment. 

 
rockaction said:
That's what I was thinking, too. Maybe Andy can explain what he means by that. I'm not even sure we ever set the goalposts.
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We discussed about a page ago why he's not OJ Howard.

Simply put, Pitts actually produced in college. Howard is pretty athletic, but it didn't translate to production - in college or the pros.

 
Andy Dufresne said:
We discussed about a page ago why he's not OJ Howard.

Simply put, Pitts actually produced in college. Howard is pretty athletic, but it didn't translate to production - in college or the pros.
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I honestly thought you guys were talking about Albert Okwuegbunam of the Broncos. My bad.

 
Andy Dufresne said:
Apparently, so was I. 

Edit: But c'mon...can't I be excused for becoming disoriented by the inclusion of Albert Okwuegbunam into a discussion on Kyle Pitts? 
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I was so far behind that I couldn't even figure out who this was when it was just written Albert O. I know who he is but I didn't put it together until it was literally* spelled out. 

*literally meaning literally, since these days people say that when they actually mean figuratively.

 
SoBeDad said:
Unless Atlanta gets a kings ransom to trade down, Pitts is going be catching passes from Ryan in 2021.
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That is possible for sure. Personally if I were the Falcons, I'd be taking Sewell, and kicking McGary to Guard, upgrading 2 OL spots. but I'd have no real issue with Pitts there either.

 
travdogg said:
That is possible for sure. Personally if I were the Falcons, I'd be taking Sewell, and kicking McGary to Guard, upgrading 2 OL spots. but I'd have no real issue with Pitts there either.
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I think CIN should also go Sewell and a quick slot guy like Toney or either Moore at 2.06. And the rest on defense. They already have strong physical guys, it seems only Higgins created much separation. 

 
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