With Ohio State preparing to play Iowa for the first time since the 2017 debacle, I thought it would be fun - I mean painful - to reflect back on perhaps the most notorious example of opposing tight ends destroying Ohio State's defense. On that terrible day, Noah Fant and TJ Hockenson - now both star TEs in the NFL - combined for 9 catches, 125 yards receiving, and 4 TDs. You know the rest of that disgusting story.
Here is an interesting factoid, though . . . if you take the entire 2017 season, the combined total receiving yards from Fant and Hockenson ended up representing 37.9% of Iowa's total passing yards.
This season, Iowa has maybe the worst offense in college football, but their leading receiver, TE Sam La Porta has hauled in 46.3% of their total passing yards!
Obviously, Sam La Porta is not more talented than the two former Hawkeyes' greats, Fant and Hockeson, but whom else besides La Porta is the craptastic Spencer Petras supposed to throw to? Whereas in 2017, Nathan Stanley could throw to RB Akrum Wadley, who was a handful coming out of the backfield, and a decent receiving corps led by Nick Easley, who had a cup of coffee in the NFL.
Nevertheless, this interesting factoid got me thinking . . . is it even a good sign when college offenses feature TEs? Ohio State fans are always clamoring for the program to throw more to TEs, but maybe high receiving yardage from TEs correlates to poor offense, counterintuitive as that might seem. This season, e.g., Michael Mayer is arguably the second best TE in the country behind Brock Bowers and we all know how much ND's offense sucks.
Another paradox got me thinking, too . . . Cade Stover is a more dangerous receiver in 2022 than Jeremy Ruckert ever was in his Ohio State career even though Ruckert is clearly a better "receiving specialist" TE. The reason for that seeming paradox is that Stover is a freaking beast as a blocker; therefore, opposing defenses cannot afford to put a good coverage guy on him because Ohio State might run the ball and that dude will get mauled!
So, I ran a few cursory, unscientific numbers to check out my hypothesis and the initial results are, basically . . . neutral. At first glance, offenses that feature TEs seem to average out to being . . . average. And maybe that's to be expected, right?
Current top 10 TEs in receiving yards per game: 1. Dalton Kinkaid, Utah; 2. Michael Mayer, ND; 3. Griffin Herbert, La Tech; 4. S. Traore, Arkansas St.; 5. Brock Bowers; 6. Will Mallory; 7. Corey Dychess, MD; 8. Joel Wilson, CMU; 9. Sam La Porta, Iowa; 10. Prieskorn, Memphis.
Total offense rankings of the above ten teams average about 59th, which is slightly above average. Considering that those ten offenses have some of the best players at a given position, TE, you might expect these numbers to be slightly above average regardless of whether featuring a TE in the offense tends to correlate with more offensive success or not.
Average ranking for points-per-game by those ten offenses: about 60th in the country. Again, slightly above average.
Those ten teams have won 31 games and lost 28.
My (jump-to-a-conclusion on some rough shoddy data) "conclusion": it appears to be insignificant whether an offense features the TE position or not.
