4 Tight Ends With Major Touchdown Upside for 2018

Tyler Eifert, Cincinnati Bengals

For Tyler Eifert, 40% of his career starts and 65% of his career touchdowns came in a single season, back in 2015. That definitely creates some uncertainty, and it makes him a very risky fantasy option this year, but a safe, high floor isn't what we're looking for in this article. We want upside, and Eifert offers that.

He has 18 touchdowns in his 23 games over the last three seasons, and his 13 touchdowns in 2015 are more than any other tight end has scored in a season since then.

The injury-plagued Eifert played only 104 snaps in 2017 before his season came to an end. In Week 1, his only complete game, he did play 89% of the Cincinnati Bengals' offensive snaps, though, meaning that even after an injury-riddled 2016 campaign, he was still in line to be the clear-cut starter over Tyler Kroft. That's something we should expect again in 2018.

Before that, Eifert played eight games in the 2016 season, but he was also somewhat limited in parts of that stretch, playing fewer than 85% of the team's offensive snaps in six of those eight contests.

Even with his limitations, he accounted for a huge 35.7% of the Bengals' red zone targets over those eight games. For context, only one player (at any position) accounted for that large a share of their team's red zone targets in 2017.

And if we go back to that absurd 2015 season, his market share was more tame, but at 22.5%, it still would have been good for top-eight at the position last year.

The Bengals don't promise to be an especially high-scoring offense, but they ranked in the top-12 in pass-to-run ratio in the red zone last year, and with Eifert's potential for a dominant market share, even a low-scoring season in Cincinnati would position him well to put up another big number in the touchdown column.