ESPN Reveals a Surprising Fantasy Ranking for TE Evan Engram
ESPN's recently-released 2020 Fantasy Football Outlook predicts Giants tight end Evan Engram will finish as the sixth-best tight end in fantasy football this year.
Engram is entering his fourth NFL season and has missed 14 of 48 possible games due to injury, including five games in 2018 and eight last season. The injuries have held Engram without a top-12 fantasy campaign since 2017, but there's no doubt he's been a significant force when healthy. Engram was one of six players who appeared in at least eight games and were targeted at least six times during 100% of those outings last season. The consistent usage helped him to five top-10 fantasy weeks in eight tries (the position's fourth-best rate). We have to knock him a bit for durability concerns, but Engram is still in his prime at age 25 and should be locked into lineups when active.
Engram's Top-6 projection is a flattering one for a tight end who has missed as much time as he has. Engram, who has played in 34 out of 48 career games so far, only played in eight games in 2019.
He finished 15th in receiving yards among NFL tight ends with 467 and tied for 19th in touchdowns with just three.
However, a reason to believe ESPN's forecast is that Engram's production over the games he did play translated to 58.39 receiving yards per game, sixth in the NFL among tight ends last season.
Fantasy projections don't necessarily equate to overall performance. But receiving yards and touchdowns are the biggest denominators for fantasy points, which do play heavily in determining the production value of a tight end.
Engram has demonstrated a lot of evidence to be a top-flight tight end in the NFL but has yet to play a full 16-game season, which has limited his value in fantasy and on the Giants roster.
Engram has proven to be versatile as a receiver and blocker, but he was primarily used as an inline blocker last season, according to Pro Football Focus.
His speed and explosiveness, combined with his height and catching ability, have made him a mismatch for defenders. Whether he can retain that explosiveness off a sprained foot that required surgery will determine if that value in fantasy--and for the Giants offense overall--will still be there moving forward.
As a rookie in 2017, Engram played in 15 games with 11 starts which is still his best season to date. That year Engram racked up 64 receptions for 722 yards and six touchdowns, which made him the fifth-best tight end in fantasy as a rookie.
Engram's production has declined in each of the two seasons since then, mostly due to injury-related absence, but he has still flashed star potential when on the field.
In 2019 Engram had two 100+ yard games. In Week 1 against the Cowboys, he hauled in 11 catches for 116 yards and a touchdown, and in Week 3 against the Bucs, Engram led the Giants with six catches for 113 receiving yards and a touchdown.
With Jason Garrett having taken over as the team's offensive coordinator, Engram will look to parlay the chemistry he started to build with quarterback Daniel Jones.
Under Garrett's guidance, Jason Witten put together a Hall-of-Fame resume in Dallas. When Garrett took over as Cowboys offensive coordinator in 2007, Witten had his first 1,000-yard season and went on to make the Pro Bowl seven times under Garrett's guidance.
Whether Engram's talent is comparable to Witten's is up for debate. Still, playing in a system that has proven highly beneficial for starting tight ends can't hurt Engram's fantasy outlook for 2020.
Engram's leverage in future contract negotiations will depend on whether he proves he can return to form and, most of all, stay healthy for all 16 games starting in 2020.
If Engram proves capable of both of those things, then he might have a case to push the Giants, who exercised the fifth-year option in his rookie deal, into signing him up long-term before his contract expires in the 2022 offseason.
For Engram, his talent, combined with the production that Garrett's offense has afforded tight ends, could lead to him possibly transcending his sixth-best projection.
The talent is certainly there; now, all he needs is the durability.
