Philadelphia Eagles: PFF gets what makes Dallas Goedert great

When the Philadelphia Eagles signed Dallas Goedert to a four-year, $57 million contract, it was far from a sure thing.

Sure, Goedert was the Eagles’ first selection in the 2018 NFL Draft, a statistical darling, and a player with all of the tools needed to become a successful tight end at the NFL level, but in practice? Goedert was always partnered up in a platoon with Zach Ertz and usually Richard Rodgers and had very rarely been afforded an opportunity to run the show as a solo attraction.

Would it work? Would Goedert be able to shoulder the burden of being a true blue number one tight end, or would he instead struggle to live up to his new status as a top-paid tight end and become an albatross on the Eagles’ salary cap?

Well, if his 2021 season is of any indication, it would appear the pride of South Dakota is all that and then some on the field, as our friends over at PFF back up with their end-of-year highest-graded players list.

The Philadelphia Eagles have to be happy with Goedert’s first big-money season.

There are three key areas of note that Pro Football Focus use to grade out tight ends, receiving, pass blocking, and run blocking.

While all three aren’t valued evenly from player to player, as for example, Jack Stoll only at 74 snaps where he ran routes as a receiver versus 40 as a pass blocker, and 377 as a run blocker, but when you throw all three together and run it into a single overall grade, it gives talent evaluators a pretty good idea of how well any given player performs on the field in any given game.

Dallas Goedert, over his 840 offensive snaps, ranked second-overall among tight ends graded by PFF in 2021.

The proud owner of a 91.1 receiving grade – the highest mark of any player at his position league-wide – a  66.1 pass-blocking grade, and a 68.9 run-blocking grade, Goedert’s 90.7 overall grade ranked higher than every tight end in the league save Mark Andrews, including All-Pros George Kittle and Travis Kelce.

Will some folks scoff at the idea of Goedert being a “better” player than Kittle and Kelce? Yes, vouching for Goedert over either player is a pretty tough case to make, but at least statistically, his efficiency is right on par with the best of the best the NFL has to offer, and that, my friends, is all the more impressive when you consider he spent the better part of the first two months of the season paired up with Zach Ertz.

While $14.25 million in AAV is a lot to pay out to a tight end in the modern-day NFL, where the position has become almost as undervalued as safety, for a team like the Eagles, who used Goedert as a slot or outside receiver for 33 percent of his snaps, having a mid-range weapon who opens up the deep ball for Quez Watkins, single-coverage on the outside for DeVonta Smith, and keeps the box appropriately loaded for Miles Sanders to do his thing is worth its weight in gold… or roughly $838,000 per regular season game.

Dallas Goedert is 27-years-old. He has 61 professional games under his belt, three playoff berths on his resume, and a franchise that clearly believes he can be a do-it-all star at the tight end position. After failing to come to terms on a contract in either the offseason or before the Zach Ertz trade, Goeder proved his worth down the stretch and was awarded a massive contract extension that almost immediately paid off, at least in the eyes of PFF.