Quote:
Originally Posted by DJ's left nut
Kellen Winslow was probably the guy who started that ball rolling. Todd Christensen was also doing the H-Back sort of thing before TG.
And I think we have to grudgingly acknowledge that Shannon Sharpe from 1993 to 1997 was every bit of what Tony G was and Tony didn't really break out until 2000.
Hard to say Tony really reset anything. He was the gold standard, but he wasn't the first.
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All true. Forgot about Winslow. Kind of before my time.
I watched Sharpe and TG; I believe that TG was better, though Sharpe was probably faster.
My point about TG resetting the position had more to do with how offenses were built by the time he passed his prime; in Sharpe's time TEs still weren't as highly valued by the NFL, not yet. RBs in general wee more highly valued than TEs then.
He was valued very highly by DEN, but even by the Broncos they neglected to use him as a primary target in the RZ, often preferring to either run the ball or find a WR instead fairly often. As such he only had 5 seasons out of 14 where he averaged more than 55 yds/game, while Kelce only has 2 seasons of less than 55 yds/game so far in his career. Sharpe has just 7 seasons being targeted more than 100 times/season, Kelce has just one season in his career being targeted less than 100 times. Kelce already has nearly 100 more catches for 1st downs than Sharpe.
And so on. Just illustrating that TEs, even on a (for that era) pass-happy DEN team, weren't used the way receiving TEs are used today. So if we can agree that TG didn't start the receiving TE trend, he was the bridge between the old school use of TEs vs. the modern era? That feels more accurate.
Whatever, at some point it's almost semantics. Tony is the gold standard of TEs, mostly for his receiving abilities, but he was also just about the most complete TE in the modern era, able to do a lot more than just catch contested balls thrown almost entirely by JAG QBs over his career. If he'd had his prime years with an elite QB, who knows how many more yards, TDs, etc. he would've had. It's actually more impressive that he accomplished everything that he did n spite of the fact that his QBs were mostly scrubs.