Football is back and its time to put on your hard hat, grab a pick axe, and mine the deep earth fantasy football gems. Let’s take a look at a tight end you probably never heard of. This week, we focus a deep dive on QB-to-TE convert Logan Thomas. Arizona took him in the fourth round of the 2014 draft as a quarterback out of Virginia Tech, but never made it big. He floated around practice squads for a few years. He converted to tight end, and found his way onto Buffalo & Detroit’s active rosters. Thomas earned a starting job in 2020, and in his first game, he played on roughly 75% of the offensive snaps.
Logan Thomas Gets the Volume
Snap count isn’t the be-all, end-all for fantasy football tight ends. You want to look at routes run or targets when trying to determine possible value. Logan Thomas saw 52-of-70 Football Team offensive snaps Sunday. Though he was not in every snap, he ran 31 routes during the game, making him primarily a pass-catching tight end. Let’s also consider his targets. Logan Thomas led his team with eight targets. This also ranked second among week one tight ends. High snap counts, high routes run per snap, and a high target volume is turning this man into a hidden gem.
Fantasy football players often forget to account for the coaching staff. Ron Rivera loves heavy volume tight ends. Looking back to 2014-2016, Greg Olsen ranked second, first and first in total targets for the Panthers. In 2017 Devin Funchess and Christian McCaffrey took over most the volume but Ed Dickson and Greg Olsen (both tight ends) ranked third and fourth in team targets that year. Rivera then catered the gameplan to CMC in the following years. However, that was due to a combination of CMC’s skill set and Greg Olsen’s age catching up to him. With no generational talent like Christian McCaffrey in Washington (sorry, Gibson Truthers), I expect Riverboat Ron’s schemes to look more like his pre-CMC Panthers squads.
Right now I’d project Logan Thomas as a high TE2 and possibly a backend TE1 to finish out the fantasy season. His volume load alone makes him a must-stash even for a week or two till we see what is going on with the Football Team.
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