Fantasy Football Week 1 Tight End Rankings: Can you trust Darren Waller in Week 1?

Chris Towers' TE rankings for Week 1

By Chris Towers

Sep 11, 2022 at 9:21 am ET • 1 min read

My rankings process for each week in Fantasy Football starts with projecting each offense, with heavy input from Vegas totals and lines to help provide a baseline. Then I go through each team armed with assumptions about how they'll distribute touches and targets based on historical trends. And once that's done, I actually go through the process of rankings the players at each position, using those projections as a baseline.

And sometimes those projections surprise me. Like, in Week 1, I initially had George Kittle and Darren Waller ranked behind both Dalton Schultz and T.J. Hockenson to start out. And it wasn't particularly close -- Schultz and Hockenson were closer to Mark Andrews than to Kittle and Waller. As you can see with my actual rankings below, I'm not going with that, but it highlights my concerns with both Kittle and Waller this season.

Those are two of the best receivers in the league at their position, but Kittle has a new quarterback in Trey Lance to deal with, and both the quality and quantity of targets are in question for him. Waller has a new coaching staff to deal with, but the bigger issue is the addition of Davante Adams, not to mention the emergence of Hunter Renfrow. Waller was one of the best tight ends in Fantasy in 2021, when he dominated targets for the Raiders, but he's seen his per-target efficiency take a hit in consecutive seasons. If he can't reverse that trend, the presence of Adams as a massive target hog could make it even harder for Waller to stand out.

I'm still giving Waller the benefit of the doubt that he'll outperform my rudimentary projections process -- Kittle isn't ranked because he isn't expected to play this week. But the reason I do the projections from a team-centric perspective first is so I'm accounting for how a player fits in their offense, and the fits for both Kittle and Waller could make it tough on them. Here's hoping my concerns end up being unfounded.