A Travis Kelce appreciation, with absurd facts, video, historical context on Chiefs’ TE
One of the tricky things in talking about the Chiefs’ offense is that it’s hard to know where one man’s brilliance ends and another’s begins. We know that Patrick Mahomes would be a star anywhere, but how much better is he here than if he’d been drafted by, say, the Chicago Bears?
We know that Tyreek Hill was a star when Mahomes was on the bench, but how much better is he with the two-way stress of Mahomes’ range and Kelce’s ownership of intermediate routes? And speaking of Kelce, he repeatedly and without prompting talks of how his career took off only after Hill became a field-stretching deep threat.
There is some humility there, because Kelce had 139 catches in the two seasons before Hill arrived and 1,125 yards in 2016, when Hill was still, literally, a return specialist. But like we said. It’s hard to know exactly where the threat Hill’s speed ends and Mahomes’ precise delivery begins.
We do know that every tight end who has ever been trusted in the following situation and pulled it off could fit on a park bench.
Just to type it out loud here: third and 1 inside the Chiefs’ own 20, so failing to convert meant punting. Kelce lined up against Eric Rowe, a converted cornerback who Dolphins coach Brian Flores moved to safety specifically to solve the team’s coverage problems against tight ends.
The Dolphins gave him a three-year extension after seeing the results and have been one of the league’s toughest defenses on tight ends. Before playing the Chiefs, opposing offenses averaged just 39 yards per game to their tight ends against Miami, including games against against San Francisco’s George Kittle (four catches for 44 yards on eight targets) and the L.A. Chargers’ Hunter Henry (four, 30 and six).
Anyway, the ball is snapped and pressure comes through the middle almost immediately, eliminating Mahomes’ chance to read through his progressions. He can either take the sack, attempt to scramble out or throw a jump ball 40 yards downfield off his backfoot with a 315-pound pass rusher crashing into him.
He chose the final option, and Kelce’s play on the ball is worth watching on replays. The ball is actually a bit underthrown. That’s not presented as a criticism, but to point out the degree of difficulty for a 6-foot-5, 260-pound man to sprint with a defensive back, turn his body, locate and high-point the ball, then win the arm-wrestling match to secure the catch before hitting the grass.
This column is about Travis Kelce, in case you couldn’t tell, and it’s probably overdue because the man is an All-Pro and future Hall of Famer at the height of his powers. In fact, in some ways, nobody has ever played the tight end position as well as Kelce at this moment.
At his current pace, Kelce would finish this season with the second-most catches ever by a tight end (111), the most yards ever (1,538, which would shatter the NFL record) and the seventh-most touchdowns (11).
He would be the first tight end to lead the league in receiving yards and is already the first tight end with five consecutive 1,000-yard seasons. No other tight end has more than two in a row, or more than four total.
Kelce has been knocked at times for his blocking, but this year he rates as the league’s best run-blocking tight end, according to Pro Football Focus, and last year he was fourth in pass-blocking.
He is generally viewed as a less-effective blocker than George Kittle (when healthy) and Tampa Bay’s Rob Gronkowski (at least in his prime), but he also makes blocks like this routinely:
Kelce is naturally blessed, but this stardom is a product of work. He missed virtually all of his rookie season in 2013, prompting some in the organization to question his toughness and reliability.
Since then, the only game he’s missed was Week 17 in 2017, when the Chiefs rested their starters with playoff seeding secured. He’s dropped just two of 92 catchable passes this season, according to PFF, which is the best rate among tight ends and would rank sixth among receivers with at least 100 targets.
Sometimes it feels misplaced to compare Kelce with other tight ends. He is essentially an oversized receiver, and the Chiefs often use him as such — 407 snaps as a receiver, compared with 335 as a tight end.
Hill is the team’s deep threat, but are you surprised to hear the only NFL player with more 20-plus yard receptions than Hill is Kelce?
He makes it work because he’s more than a big body. He has the feet of basketball guard and the instincts to know exactly how to use his gifts to throw his defender’s momentum the wrong way at the right time.
Precise footwork and trustworthy hands are only the beginning, because Kelce’s Hall of Fame montage will include repeated clips of him making the catch while going horizontally across the field, planting one of his big cleats hard into the turf, and then turning to run the exact opposite way, his coverage defender flailing to the ground.
Kelce has 510 yards after the catch, which is not only more than any other tight end or receiver but would be a top-10 total for tight ends by itself. These are facts, and they are absurd.
This column has referenced Kelce as a future Hall of Famer twice now — three if you count this sentence! — and that’s not said lightly.
Kelce made his first catch in his age-25 season, at which point Tony Gonzalez had three All-Pro selections and nearly 4,000 yards. Kelce is now 31, and currently sits 223 catches and 2,167 yards behind Gonzalez at the same age.
So Kelce’s career, when counting stats, is unlikely to match Gonzalez’s, but it’s also true that no tight end has ever had seven years this productive. In fact, no tight end in league history has seven seasons within 1,000 yards of Kelce.
The Chiefs’ Super Bowl championship was (justifiably) consumed largely as a coronation for Mahomes, a legacy for Reid and long overdue for Kansas City. The team’s best highlights are often Mahomes doing something crazy, or Hill doing something fast.
Kelce isn’t overlooked, exactly. But his career has often played out in someone else’s shadow — Gronkowski’s in the beginning, Kittle’s lately, and Mahomes’ locally.
It’s easy to miss, then, but we aren’t just watching a great player, or a tight end so good his production matches that of the league’s best receivers. We’re watching one of the best to ever do it, an all-time talent at the absolute peak of his ability.
The NFL has never seen something quite like this, and who can know when we will again?
This story was originally published December 18, 2020 at 5:00 AM.