With three weeks remaining in the 2020 NFL regular season, a tight end leads the NFL in receiving yards. Not catches or touchdowns or reception rate, but receiving yards.
Travis Kelce can become the first player in NFL history to lead the league in yardage as a tight end. And if he maintains his current pace, he should easily finish off the best season of all-time at that position.
The 31-year-old Kansas City Chiefs superstar has caught exactly eight passes for 136 yards and a touchdown in back-to-back victories, giving him five 100-yard performances in a six-game span.
Now, Kelce is on pace to catch 111 passes (only one tight end has ever caught more than 110) for a league-leading 1,538 yards (no tight end has ever even hit the 1,400-yard mark in a single season) and 11 touchdowns (a mark hit by a tight end on 23 occasions).
Only seven qualified wide receivers have gained more yards per target than Kelce (10.4), who could easily top those current paces based on his recent play.
Plug his averages from the last six games into the final three weeks of this campaign and you get 115 receptions for 1,625 yards and 11 scores.
Only six players in the history of the league have ever caught that many passes for that many yards with that many touchdowns, and none of them — Jerry Rice, Isaac Bruce, Antonio Brown, Herman Moore, Torry Holt, Marvin Harrison — played the tight end position.
Most of those guys are already in the Hall of Fame or will soon be there. That now seems inevitable for Kelce, who more broadly is experiencing his fifth consecutive season with 1,000-plus yards and his seventh in a row with at least 800. He already ranks 12th on the all-time yardage list at tight end, and at his current rate, could move into the top five before celebrating his 32nd birthday.
He may or may not ever reach Tony Gonzalez-level cumulative numbers, but by the time Kelce walks away, there’s a chance we’ll consider two Chiefs to be the most dominant tight ends in NFL history.
