We read all 39 tight ends: re-price 2025's fantasy TE finishes at the position's average touchdown rate and the board reshuffles — TE7 Goedert falls five spots, TE8 Johnson climbs three

We pulled the complete 2025 regular-season stat line for every NFL tight end and kept the 39 who drew 40 or more targets — the qualifying pool [verified, nflverse `stats_player_reg_2025`]. Across those 39, tight ends caught 169 receiving touchdowns on 2,838 targets: a pooled rate of 5.95% of targets turned into a score [verified, re-derived]. The individual rates did not cluster around that mean. They ran from 1.2% (Cade Otton, 1 touchdown on 81 targets) to 14.3% (Colby Parkinson, 8 on 56) — an 11.6-fold spread in how often each tight end's targets turned into scores. That spread, as much as usage, moved the top of the board. Dallas Goedert finished as the PPR TE7 (185.1 points) on 591 receiving yards in 15 games — 13 of the 39 qualified tight ends out-gained him. What carried him was 11 touchdowns on 82 targets, a 13.4% rate, third-highest among qualifiers and 2.25 times the pool average. At the pool's own 5.95% rate, 82 targets project to 4.9 touchdowns, not 11 — a gap of roughly six scores, or about 37 PPR points ^mmodeled. Re-score every qualified tight end at that neutral rate and Goedert's line falls to 148.4 points, which ranks TE12 in the re-priced pool — a five-spot drop ^mmodeled. The same math lifts the tight ends the scoreboard underpaid. Juwan Johnson gained 889 yards — third-most among the 39 — on 3 touchdowns (a 2.9% rate) and finished PPR TE8; re-priced to the pool rate he ranks TE5 ^mmodeled. Dalton Schultz (777 yards, 3 touchdowns, actual TE10) and rookie Tyler Warren (817 yards, 4 touchdowns, TE4) re-price to TE6 and TE3 respectively ^mmodeled. The one line the exercise barely moves is the one on top: Trey McBride's 126 catches, 1,239 yards and 11 touchdowns came on 169 targets — a 6.5% touchdown rate, right at the pool average — so his TE1 finish (315.9 points) holds at TE1 when re-priced (310.3) ^mmodeled. McBride and Goedert scored the same 11 touchdowns; McBride needed twice the targets to do it, and only one of the two finishes is a volume story.

The following is analysis, not fact. The "re-priced" board is a benchmark, not a forecast: it asks what each tight end's total would have been at the pool's average touchdown rate, holding targets and yards fixed ^mmodeled. It is a way to separate the workload behind a fantasy finish (targets, catches, yards) from how much of it rode on turning that workload into touchdowns. The separation bites hardest at tight end, where the volume is thin: a tight end drawing 80–100 targets is a busy one, so three or four extra touchdowns move a player four or five spots on a 12-team board ^mmodeled. Read that way, 2025's tight end results split cleanly into two groups the box score blends together. The finishers whose ranking rests on yardage and targets — McBride, Pitts (928 yards on the position's second-most targets, 118), Warren, Kelce (851 yards) — are describing a workload. The finishers whose ranking rests on an above-pool touchdown rate — Goedert at 13.4%, Parkinson at 14.3%, Tucker Kraft at 13.6% on 44 targets — are describing a rate — and it is the above-average rate, not the workload, that the re-pricing discounts most ^mmodeled. Goedert is the sharpest case in the pool: 11 touchdowns on just 82 targets, a 13.4% rate, and by targets and yards a mid-pack line among the 39 — so the touchdowns, not the workload, carried the TE7 finish ^mmodeled.

A pool-average touchdown rate is a blunt neutral point, and the honest objection is that touchdown rate is not pure noise. A tight end who earns a higher rate through a genuine red-zone role — size, target quality inside the 10, an offense that funnels goal-line looks to him — would regress less than a flat model assumes. Whether Goedert is such a case is the open question this exercise cannot answer: secondary reporting on his season called him "an integral red zone threat," but we did not pull the per-player red-zone target data that would test it, so the structural share of his rate is unquantified here ^sspeculative. On that logic, re-pricing him to the pool average may overcorrect, with a fair discount for his line sitting somewhere between his 11 touchdowns and the 4.9 the flat model implies ^sspeculative. The reverse caveat applies to the underpaid group: a low touchdown rate can foreshadow a shrinking role as easily as a rebound, and this backward-looking exercise cannot tell which ^sspeculative. Johnson's 889-yard line came on heavy volume — but a re-priced board says nothing about whether that volume repeats. This is a single completed season (2025); it is a look at what already happened, not a projection of 2026. The claim here is narrow and backward-looking: across these 39 tight ends, the fantasy order and the usage order diverged, and the wedge between them was a touchdown rate that ranged 12-fold around its own average.

From a single manager's chair, Goedert's TE7 line and Johnson's TE8 line look one slot apart. Read across all 39 qualified tight ends at once, they sit at opposite ends of the same effect: Johnson's finish carried by yards on a below-average touchdown rate, Goedert's by a touchdown rate more than double the pool's — the same raw finish resting on very different foundations.