Summer Sleeper: San Francisco 49ers

Austan Kas Posted On July 22, 2017

We begin our annual 32-part Summer Sleeper series where DLF scribes identify a lightly-touted player on each NFL roster who may be worthy of your consideration. Our subjects all have varying levels of “sleeperness,” but each merits a bit of in-depth discussion here in the Premium Content section.

To help everybody along, we are going to be categorizing our sleepers under one of three headings:

Super Deep Sleepers – Players who aren’t roster-worthy in 12-team leagues, but are still worth keeping an eye on.
Deep Sleepers – An end of the roster player who is more often than not on the waiver wire in 12-team leagues.
Sleeper – A likely rostered player who makes for a good trade target. Their startup ADP puts them out of the top-175 or so.

Because we aren’t going give you the likes of mainstream sleepers, most of these players will undoubtedly fizzle. All we are asking is for you to keep an open mind and perhaps be willing to make room for one of these players on your bench. You never know when the next Willie Snead is going to spring up. Feel free to add your own thoughts about our choice for the designated sleeper, or nominate one of your own in the comments below.

In this series, I’ve been super fortunate to hit on a breakout guy in each of the last two seasons. First, it was Thomas Rawls in 2015, followed by Rob Kelley in 2016. I wish I could tell you I had some magical formula, but the truth is those were basically educated guesses (maybe all of fantasy is just educated guesses?). In each case, the player’s team had a somewhat unsettled depth chart at their position. Kelley and Rawls weren’t expected to get much run, but it wasn’t impossible — Washington had very few options at running back and Marshawn Lynch was getting older — to find a path to touches for either back. Then both players were able to take advantage of their chance when they got an opportunity.

Everything about the San Francisco 49ers is “unsettled.” One of the worst rosters in the league, they have very few positions across the board which you can look at, point to a player and say “yeah, he’s their dude.” That makes them a pretty intriguing squad from a fantasy perspective because there is opportunity — the key element in any fantasy breakout — available, even though the likely horrid-ness of their offense in the short term makes them fairly unappealing right now.

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Rookie running back Joe Williams has been a well-publicized off-season darling, but tight end George Kittle is another 49ers’ rookie worth monitoring.

George Kittle, TE

Category: Super Deep Sleeper

San Francisco selected Kittle out of Iowa in the fifth round (146th overall). He’s listed at 6-foot-4, 247 pounds, and he’s coming from a program which runs a pro-style offense under Kirk Ferentz.

Kittle far from lit it up with the Hawkeyes, though. As a junior in 2015, he made 20 catches for 290 yards and six scores. He followed it up with 22 grabs for 314 and four touchdowns last season. Even when you take into account how poorly college teams typically are in their utilization of tight ends, those numbers are underwhelming. On the bright side, ten of Kittle’s 42 catches over the last two years went for touchdowns, so he’s got a nice track record of red-zone production.

While nothing there is too appealing with his stats, it’s Kittle’s potential opportunity in San Francisco which we can be excited about.

Incumbent tight end Vance McDonald appears to be on his way out of town. The team was shopping him during the draft, per reports, and he’s not a lock to make the final roster. Aside from McDonald (and Kittle), the 49ers’ other tight ends include Blake Bell, Garrett Celek and Logan Paulsen — none of whom put much of a damper on Kittle’s potential for snaps.

Rookie tight ends notoriously struggle to make the transition from the college game to the pros, so Kittle, even if he’s gifted significant snaps in 2017, doesn’t figure to be a big fantasy factor. But with Head Coach Kyle Shanahan and General Manager John Lynch taking the reins this off-season, the 49ers are starting a rebuild from scratch. The organization will be looking at everything with a long-term perspective, and we can afford to do the same with Kittle.

Given the depth across the league at tight end, which is boosted by the massive influx of talent at the position in the 2017 class, you can’t really justify rostering Kittle right now in any format outside of a league which is deeper than the San Andreas Fault. After all, he’s not even in our top ten tight ends in the 2017 class going by our staff rankings. But Kittle is definitely a name to know, especially if we keep getting positive reports about him out of Niners camp.

Shanahan has been a part of good offenses throughout his coaching career. While the 49ers appear to be a long way from having a quality attack, Kittle could turn into a solid foundational piece in the rebuild, and he could eventually be one of San Francisco’s more highly targeted players until the team builds up its talent at the wide receiver spot.

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