Over the offseason, the Kansas City Chiefs gave Travis Kelce a contract that made him the highest-paid tight end in the entire league. But it’s safe to say that he is not living up to that contract.
As Michael David Smith of Pro Football Talk points out, Travis Kelce is now in the midst of the least productive season of his entire career just months after becoming the league’s highest-paid tight end.
This season, Kelce is averaging a career-low 8.4 yards per catch – about four yards fewer than he has averaged the rest of his career previously.
“For most of Travis Kelce’s career, the Chiefs have known that if they got him the ball, he was good for about 12 or 13 yards: From Kelce’s first season as the Chiefs’ starting tight end in 2014 through 2022, Kelce averaged somewhere between 12.2 and 13.5 yards per catch every year. That is no longer the case,” Smith wrote for Pro Football Talk.
“In 2023, Kelce’s yards per catch average dropped significantly, to a career-low 10.6 yards. And this year, Kelce’s average has dropped significantly again, all the way down to 8.4 yards per catch, by far the worst mark of his career.”
This is obviously a pretty horrible situation for Kelce as he obviously wants to be able to produce the way he has in the past, but he is limited by his aging body.
“At the age of 35, Kelce has lost a step, and as a result, he’s running shorter routes and doing less with the ball in his hands. He’s also not finding the end zone as much, with just two touchdowns through 14 games. And his first downs have declined as well, from 78 in 2022 to 50 last year to 41 this year,” Smith wrote.
Kelce is still seeing a lot of passes go his way. He actually leads the team with 84 receptions. But that only adds to the concerns about his explosiveness. As Smith points out, every other player with at least 75 catches this season is averaging at least 10.0 yards per catch.
The good news for Kelce is that it clearly has not been hurting the team all that much as the Chiefs have the best record in the NFL.
We’ll have to see whether or not Kelce can improve that production in the offseason, but this is a pretty clear sign that he is nearing the end of his NFL career.
