The Kansas City Chiefs made one of the biggest and riskiest bets of the offseason last March when they traded away superstar receiver Tyreek Hill, pushing their chips in on the idea that soon-to-be-33-year-old tight end Travis Kelce could play the role of the team’s de facto no. 1 receiver.
With a rare knack for getting open and a mystical on-field connection with quarterback Patrick Mahomes, Kelce did exactly that and more for the new-look Kansas City offense, notching career highs with 110 catches (third in the NFL) and 12 touchdowns (second), while tallying 1,338 yards (eighth). As a chains-moving, YAC-creating, red-zone-mismatch-creating playmaker, Kelce helped carry Kansas City to a no. 1 seed in the AFC and eventual Super Bowl berth. He didn’t just fend off Father Time to hold his place among the league’s top tier of tight ends this year—he opened up a Secretariat-like lead on every other player at the position.
Elite production is nothing new for Kelce, of course. The future Hall of Famer has been a prolific pass catcher throughout his career, with seven 1,000-yard seasons under his belt (no other tight end in league history has more than four), including three separate campaigns of 100-plus catches, 1,300-plus yards, and 10-plus touchdowns (no other tight end has even one). But at 33—well past the age when many players start to fend off the dreaded performance cliff—Kelce is still out here doing what very few tight ends in the NFL do: functioning as the primary target and focal point of a pass offense. And crucially, he’s doing it without the benefit of the field-tilting gravity that Hill brought to the team’s offense the previous six seasons.
Even though they traded Hill, the Chiefs didn’t completely ignore the receiver position this offseason, of course, signing JuJu Smith-Schuster and Marquez Valdes-Scantling in free agency, drafting Skyy Moore in the second round, and trading for Kadarius Toney midway through the season. And those four joined forces to replace Hill’s lost production. But none of them came close to re-creating the game-plan-altering impact Hill creates for a defense. Opposing defenses knew that Kelce was The Guy for Mahomes, and he still went out and put up top-shelf numbers. Look no further than the team’s divisional-round win over the Jaguars, when Jacksonville somehow allowed Kelce to catch 14 passes for 98 yards and two touchdowns.
The unique nature of Kelce’s role in the Chiefs offense—and just his general awesomeness therein—really struck me when I attended the Senior Bowl last week and watched receivers and tight ends run routes against man-to-man coverage at practices. The contrast between the two groups produced a painfully obvious but somehow profound moment of clarity: Receivers are twitched-up athletes with lightning-quick feet, explosive jumping ability, and take-the-top-off-the-defense speed. Tight ends are, relatively and generally speaking, lumbering oafs.
Tight ends are bigger and heavier and often asked to block—I get that—but there’s also a reason most teams don’t have their version of Travis Kelce: Travis Kelce is a unicorn. As the league is inundated with talented, game-changing receivers, Kelce remains one of a few tight ends who knows how to get open on almost every play. Among receivers and tight ends with 50-plus targets in 2022 (114 total), Kelce ranked eighth in yards per route run against zone coverage (2.45) and 24th against man coverage (2.18), per TruMedia. Among tight ends only, he ranked first and second, respectively, in those categories. He can get it done from every alignment, too: Kelce averaged more than twice as many yards per route run as any other tight end when split out wide (1.94) this year. And if we widen the scope to the past five years, only three players (Justin Jefferson, Julio Jones, and Michael Thomas) have averaged more than Kelce’s 2.54 yards per route run on plays when he’s lined up in the slot or outside (basically, on plays where he lines up as a receiver).
He has certainly slowed down over the years, but Kelce is no lumbering oaf. He’s a savvy route runner with incredible body control and the ability to sink his hips, pivot, and cut away from defenders on a dime. I’ve always thought that Kelce looks like he’s pretending to surf when he runs. He’s out there like he’s Bodhi, at one with the ocean, making bottom turns and cutbacks through the defense en route to a league-best (among TEs and WRs) 648 yards after the catch in 2022. (By the way I know nothing about surfing terminology.)
There are ways to try to explain away Kelce’s continued dominance. Some might say that Mahomes has been forced to throw to Kelce so much this year because there isn’t much talent at receiver. That’s partially true, and we could point to the fact that Kelce notched a career-low 6.89-yard average depth of target this season. But the well-developed connection he has with Mahomes has also manifested in the form of 54 plays of 10-plus yards (tied for eighth among pass catchers) and 78 first-down receptions (which ranked second only to Justin Jefferson). Kelce was especially effective on scramble drill plays, one of the foundational pieces of Patrick Mahomes’s game. On dropbacks that lasted more than three seconds from snap to throw, Kelce tied for the league lead in catches (29) and first downs (26). He was a prolific producer in the red zone, too, leading the NFL in both receptions (13) and touchdowns (eight) on plays inside the 10-yard line. And he’s always adroit at executing whatever hare-brained trick-play idea comes to Andy Reid. Kelce has provided massive value to the team’s post-Hill offense, no matter how you slice it.
Kelce will have a good chance to show again that he’s truly a one-of-one player on Sunday: a tight end who’s somehow upstaging receivers in the golden age of the receiver position. With the Chiefs’ already-thin pass-catcher corps banged up heading into Super Bowl LVII (Smith-Schuster and Toney are both questionable for the game after sitting out of practice last week), Kelce is likely to get the full schematic attention of the Philadelphia Eagles. The matchup between Kelce and the Philly defenders mirrors most of the other story lines of this game: It’s a strength on strength. The Eagles, for their part, have been good against opposing tight ends this year: They haven’t allowed more than 70 yards to a tight end this season and have surrendered just three total touchdowns to the position, including their two playoff wins. But they also haven’t played against Kelce, who has turned into one of the ultimate outliers in football.
I’m not telling you anything new by saying that Travis Kelce will be an important player to watch in this Super Bowl matchup. But I do think we’ve gotten a little bit of superstar fatigue with Kelce after watching him stack up so many elite seasons. All his production and all his ridiculous plays seem to blend together and start to feel, paradoxically, almost mundane. That’s why it’s worth reminding ourselves that we’re privileged to watch one of the all-time best tight ends go out and play with a rare mastery. However much we appreciate the greatness of Travis Kelce, it’s probably not enough.
