Kyle Pitts (Surprise, Surprise) Risky Pick at Current Redraft ADP
Atlanta Falcons tight end Kyle Pitts Sr. put together the best season of his career in 2025, catching 88 passes for 928 yards and five touchdowns on 118 targets across 17 games.
The Falcons rewarded that production with a three-year, $54 million contract extension this offseason, including $36 million guaranteed, making Pitts the third-highest-paid tight end in football by average annual value. He now enters 2026 as the clear No. 2 option in Atlanta’s passing game behind Drake London.
Pitts finished 2025 as the TE5 on a per-game PPR basis, which makes his current price near the sixth tight end off the board a defensible one on the surface. But his track record before last season complicates the picture. Between 2022 and 2024, Pitts never caught more than 53 passes, never topped 667 receiving yards, and never scored more than four touchdowns in a single season, a run of results that turned him into one of fantasy football’s most infamous disappointments relative to his draft pedigree.
The quarterback situation in Atlanta adds another layer of uncertainty. Michael Penix Jr. is working his way back from a partially torn ACL suffered late in the 2025 season, and his readiness for Week 1 remains unclear. The Falcons responded by signing Tua Tagovailoa in free agency, but Tagovailoa is coming off a rough final season in Miami that included a career-high 15 interceptions and an eventual benching. Neither quarterback enters camp with clear standing as the guaranteed Week 1 starter.
Pitts does have real things going for him. He is locked into a featured role behind London, the Falcons’ new coaching staff has spoken publicly about wanting to get him more involved, and his per-game production last season stacked up with the position’s best. A full offseason of continuity, rather than another disrupted quarterback situation, could help him build on his 2025 breakout.
Still, drafting Pitts as a clear top-six tight end means paying for a single strong season on top of three years of inconsistency, all while betting on a quarterback room that hasn’t settled its starter. For redraft managers who value certainty, that combination of risk factors is enough to make Pitts a name worth fading at his current price, even with his obvious upside if things break right.
