Fantasy Upside
Travis Kelce has been dethroned as the overall TE1 only twice since the 2016 season, and Sam LaPorta had the luxury of doing so as a rookie. Fading rookie tight ends seems like a distant memory at this point, and LaPorta is a catalyst for that shifting mindset after logging an 86-889-10 stat line in Year 1. We should expect he and WR Amon-Ra St. Brown to continue putting defenses in a blender in the intermediate area of the field in 2024, leading to another 100-target season from LaPorta.
Fantasy Downside
While we may not expect LaPorta's usage to diminish in Year 2, his ten touchdowns were a bit of an outlier last season. LaPorta scored a touchdown on 8.3% of his 120 targets, by far the highest rate of the 20 tight ends who earned at least 70 targets, with George Kittle (six scores on 90 targets) the only one even close, at 6.6%. There's also the chance that Jameson Williams finally emerges as a former first-round pick and offers more to the team than Josh Reynolds did last year.
2024 Bottom Line
Over the last decade, repeating as a year-to-year TE1 has proven difficult for anyone not named Travis Kelce, but you also no longer have to pay a first-round fantasy selection to find out if LaPorta can do it. He was a consistent contributor throughout the season and came on even stronger as the calendar ran out, scoring 13.7 half-PPR points and six of his touchdowns from Weeks 12-18. He's a good bet to carry that momentum over to 2024.
