Miami Dolphins tight end Mike Gesicki enjoyed a breakout over the team’s final 9 games that lived up to the expectation set in place when the team drafted Gesicki in the 2nd-round of the 2018 NFL Draft. Gesicki, who hadn’t found the end zone through his first year and a half as a Miami Dolphin, would go on to find the end zone five times over the team’s final 9 games and finished the year in excess of 50 receptions and a total of 570 yards through the air.
What contributed to the breakout?
Miami unlocked Gesicki’s potential by freeing him from the pass protection reps he was bogged down in throughout the course of the 2018 season and by finding a quarterback in Ryan Fitzpatrick that wasn’t afraid to through to Gesicki in tight man coverage. On those targets, Gesicki’s catch radius, length and ball skills all shined as he out-worked defenders up the seam to haul in passes and help create chunk plays for the Dolphins offense.
It was quite the relief after seeing Gesicki struggle so much early on in his career, but now the question becomes how high the ceiling is and how close can Gesicki get to in throughout the 2020 season?
He won’t be without challenges, as new offensive coordinator Chan Gailey’s offense hasn’t traditionally been one that feeds tight ends with regularity. There are few examples of Gailey’s horizontal spread concepts producing big numbers for the big guys at the position (the 2008 performance of Hall of Fame TE Tony Gonzalez is the lone exception), but Gesicki won’t necessarily need gaudy numbers to make a big jump. After finishing 12th among NFL tight ends in receiving yards last year, Gesicki would be well on his way to reaching his ceiling if he simply maintained his pace from the final 9 games of 2019 — his 741 yard pace over those 9 contests would have landed him 7th among NFL tight ends last season.
And his 5 scores over those final 9 games also project to 9 scores over the course of a 16 game sample size — which would have been good for tied for 4th among all NFL players last season.
We won’t need to see much more from Gesicki than what we saw in 2019 in order for him to fulfill his potential, we simply need to see that production sustained for a full season.
