2019 Summer Sleeper: Tennessee Titans

Noah Hills Posted On July 31, 2019

In our annual 32-part Summer Sleeper series, 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 to 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 Adam Thielen 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.

The Tennessee Titans offense was a Pandora’s Box of ineptitude last season. Trotting out a tag team of Blaine Gabbert and a numb-limbed Marcus Mariota at quarterback while featuring names like Tajae Sharpe, Luke Stocker, Anthony Firkser, Darius Jennings, and Cameron Batson on their top-ten most targeted players, the unit finished in the bottom half of the league in total yards, total points, and percentage of drives ending in a score.

After a season that saw the offense near rock bottom, Tennessee adds steady slot man Adam Humphries, elite prospect AJ Brown, and previously injured veteran tight end Delanie Walker to their receiving corps, as well as presumably some feeling back to the extremities of the guy under center. Just by virtue of an increase in talent — not to mention a regression-to-the-mean, it-couldn’t-possibly-be-any-worse statistical bounceback — we should expect the Titans to be an improved unit going forward. Any likelihood of that is not currently baked into the dynasty ADPs of their skill position players. Perhaps the player most egregiously left on the scrap heap is a third-year tight end with an excellent prospect profile.

Jonnu Smith, TE

Category: Sleeper

Smith has failed to become fantasy-relevant through his first two years after being selected in the third round of the 2017 Draft, eclipsing 50 yards and garnering more than five targets each just one time through 29 career games. Since a December 2017 startup ADP highpoint of 138.5, one disappointing season in which he couldn’t take advantage of the injured Walker later, the ADP of the 93rd-percentile SPARQ-X athlete with the 92nd-percentile College Dominator Rating and the 100th-percentile College Breakout Age has plummeted to 240.2 in DLF startup mocks, where he is being taken as the TE38.

Excellent work has been done on the career arcs of tight ends in fantasy football, much of it concluding that almost nothing should be expected of 22- and 23-year old players or those in their first or second year in the league. The evidence-based expectation of the age-24/third-year breakout is a commonality of the tight end analysis in this article by Jon Diment for Dynasty Nerds, this article by Mike Braude for apexfantasyleagues.com, this article for fantasyindex.com, as well as this FFStatistics.com article by DLF’s own Peter Howard.

Given the kind of historical trends illustrated in such research as shared above, almost nothing should have been expected from Smith in year one, or even as a starter in year two. When tight ends really take off and join the fantasy fray as startable players, is in either their age 24 season or their third year in the league. Jonnu Smith enters 2019 as a 24-year old in his third pro season.

The main barrier to entry for Smith’s fantasy ascension is the presence of the aforementioned Walker in the starting tight end chair. The two most likely possibilities for this season seem to be that Walker recovers from his broken ankle and retains his number one spot on the depth chart for another year, or that the 35-year old declines due to health and age and is supplanted by a younger, fresher talent in Smith.

Whichever way the cookie crumbles, Walker’s dead cap drops to less than $2 million after this season, and the Titans would save $6.7 million off their 2020 cap if they were to cut the then 36-year old prior to June 1st of next year. Even if Smith doesn’t end up as the starting tight end at some point during the 2019 season, he remains a quality buy-low target throughout the year as a pending starter with high-snap share upside (he’s no move tight end at 248 pounds, and he already notched an 82.9% snap share in 2018) in 2020 and beyond. His trade value can only go up as the months pass and a potential Walker cut looms larger, so I prefer to acquire and stash at dirt cheap prices now.

Nearly everything is there for Jonnu Smith to make the jump to fantasy starter-hood:

Excellent prospect profile
Playing behind an aging, recently injured player
Catching passes from a player who has already supported three top-seven tight end fantasy seasons
24 years old
In his third year

Add roster bubble prices (according to DLF’s Trade Finder tool, three recent trades for Smith saw him be acquired for a 2020 sixth-round pick, a 2020 fourth, and a 2021 third) to the equation, and Smith is a great cognitive dissonance scrap heap buy-low option heading into 2019.