2021 Adam Trautman Fantasy Football Player Profile

It’s that time of year once again! Football Absurdity will bring you a breakdown of every notable fantasy football-relevant player throughout June, July, and August. We’ve run through 20 quarterbacks, 40 running backs, and 50 wide receivers! Let’s turn our attention to the position some hate so much they want to ditch it entirely. That’s right, it’s time for the tight end fantasy football previews! The next guy up didn’t do much last year, but we won’t hold that against him! It’s the 2021 Adam Trautman fantasy football player profile!

Adam Trautman ADP & AAV:

Average Draft Position (HPPR): TE23, Pick 208 [Prior to Michael Thomas injury news]
Average Auction Value: $1.3 (TE15)

Adam Trautman Statistics:

2021 Adam Trautman Fantasy Football Overview:

Adam Trautman, like most rookie tight ends, failed to make an impact in his first year in the league. He mustered just a 47% snap share, crossing the 50% threshold once. According to playerprofiler.com, he ran just 10.8 routes per game. That means that when he was in, the Saints mostly had him block. I don’t know how much you know about football, but if you’re blocking, you can’t catch a football. This is why he had just 16 targets last season, and did basically nothing last year.

But, the reason I like Adam Trautman has nothing to do with his usage last season. It has everything to do with who he is as a player, and how Saints utilize tight ends. At Dayton, Trautman’s game tape reminds me a lot of George Kittle. He was out there just destroying opponents, playing as a man among children. He was a monster who worked all over the field. Adam Trautman could legitimately be the next George Kittle-style breakout at tight end.

Adam Trautman doesn’t have George Kittle-level athleticism, but with an 8.74 RAS score, he still sits as an 85th-percentile tight end since 2010.

2021 Adam Trautman Draft Strategy:

Adam Trautman Auction Value: $0
Draft Ranking: Find out for your league settings in a Beersheet!

As you can see, Trautman is very athletic. But, athleticism does not make for fantasy football points alone. Luckily, there’s plenty of opportunities for Trautman to produce in the Saints’ passing game in 2021. Personally, I think Tayson Hill starting will cause the most problems for Trautman. But, he still averaged 28.5 targets per game in his starts last year. Over the course of a seventeen-game season, that comes out to 485 pass attempts.

Let’s say they continue their trend of throwing the ball to tight ends about 18.5% of the time. That gives the tight end room about 90 targets. If Trautman gets the Jared Cook role (70% of targets in 2020), that gives him 63 targets. I will most definitely take that as a decent starting point for Trautman in a Saints offense that lost Emmanuel Sanders and Jared Cook last season, and who added nobody in the passing game.

He’s basically free. I love Adam Trautman in both snake leagues and salary cap drafts this year and is my “go home” player of choice when deploying my “Go Big or Go Home” tight end strategy of getting Travis Kelce, George Kittle, and Darren Waller or waiting until the last few rounds of the draft to get a tight end. He’s at the end of The Tight End Blob and has top-eight upside. That’s precisely where you want to snatch up a player in The Blob.

NEWS UPDATE:

So, full disclosure, we write these things about a week before they go up on the site. Since I wrote this and now, the Saints announced that Michael Thomas is likely looking at missing September and October. In response, the Adam Trautman love has flown through the roof. He’s jumped into the top-ten in a lot of experts’ rankings. And honestly, around TE10, I don’t hate it. He’s still firmly in The Tight End Blob, which means you can still find good value there. There’s a chance he leads the Saints in targets, which would still make him a good pick in that range. If he’s still going outside the top-twelve at the position in your draft, that’s a smash value draft.

I probably would top him out around TE8 or TE9. I don’t see myself taking him over the big five, Kyle Pitts, or Dallas Goedert. You could make a case for him over Logan Thomas and/or Noah Fant. Prior to the Michael Thomas injury, I had him in a tier with those other two guys, so I might be biased.

Best Case Scenario:

He gobbles up a ton of targets, leading to a big touchdown season. He finishes as TE6.

Worst Case Scenario:

The Saints’ offense is even more dysfunctional than we think, and he only finishes around TE15.

Check out all our 2021 player profiles, here.

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[Statistics are sourced from pro-football-reference.com, airyards.com, and ftnfantasy.com]

[Image Source: Image Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/WFT_TE_Logan_Thomas.jpg, cropped under CC BY SA 2.0]