Arizona Cardinals - Fantasy News

Jermaine Gresham 2017 Fantasy Projections

by Adam Markowitz

8/11/17

NFL

Arizona Cardinals

Jermaine Gresham

When Jermaine Gresham was a first-round pick of the Cincinnati Bengals, he was billed to be one of the elite athletes at the tight end position. Fantasy relevance was supposed to be a given, and he was supposed to help turn the Cincinnati offense into a juggernaut.

It never panned out.

Gresham topped out at 737 yards in 2013 before ultimately leaving the Queen City in free agency after the 2015 campaign. A switch to the Arizona Cardinals hasn't proven fruitful. He's coming off of a season in which he ranked No. 36 amongst all tight ends in Dober Fantasy Points (4.64 per game), and he has just three touchdowns in his two seasons in the desert.

At 29 years old, Gresham is at the point of his career in which he has to really start to produce or risk becoming a roster casualty.

Why Jermaine Gresham Will Be A 2017 Fantasy Football Sleeper

Even though Gresham hasn't even been a top 30 tight end over the course of the last two seasons, he still has an immense amount of talent and game-breaking physical ability. He only caught 37 balls last year, but he had a stretch of eight straight games toward the end of the regular season in which he had at least 5.2 DFPs. Those aren't huge numbers, but they are big enough to far exceed his Projected Fantasy Points most days.

Gresham was fourth on the team in red zone targets with seven in 2016. Again, that isn't a huge number, but catching three or four passes a season inside the 20-yard line is going to make Gresham a lot more valuable in the average week than your run-of-the-mill second tight end on most rosters.

Why Jermaine Gresham Will Be A 2017 Fantasy Football Bust

The Cardinals simply aren't using Gresham properly for fantasy purposes. If he played in New England, Gresham would immediately be a top 10 threat at tight end with the way he can stretch the field and provide mismatches for opposing linebackers and safeties.

The biggest problem Gresham has is that he's largely blocked based on the way the team generally operates offensively. Larry Fitzgerald lines up in the slot all the time, a place where Gresham would be doing his best work. David Johnson catches more passes out of the backfield than any other back not named Le'Veon Bell. Many of those are middle screens or simple one-cut routes back towards the center of the field to get him in space. Meanwhile, Gresham is generally used as a decoy or a blocker in those situations.

Gresham's 391 yards was the most by a tight end in Arizona since Rob Housler had 454 yards in 2013. The last Cardinals tight end to get to 500 yards in a season was Freddie Jones back in 2003. Jeff Blake was the team's quarterback at the time. Also, Finding Nemo was one of the top movies of the year, and Facebook wasn't even invented yet. No one has ever tweeted or made a Snapchat video about a relevant Arizona tight end either.

Thus, Gresham clearly has an uphill battle in front of him to eke out fantasy relevance. He's not really blocked on the depth chart itself, knowing that Troy Niklas is the team's other primary tight end. But the Cardinals haven't invested anything in their tight ends in literally over a decade and probably won't be overly interested in doing so in 2017 either.