Jake Ferguson is entering his fifth season with the Dallas Cowboys. The fantasy community continues to draft him as a set-and-forget option at his position. There is a fair amount to work through with the veteran tight end. Should fantasy managers be drafting Ferguson in 2026?
Should You Draft Jake Ferguson in Fantasy Football?
We’ll start with Ferguson’s ADP, which is 108.6 in PFN’s Free Fantasy Mock Draft Simulator. He checks in as the TE14 in Kyle Soppe’s and my consensus rankings, and we have him projected for 9.55 fantasy points per game.
Last season, Ferguson started off on a tear. He only had 7.3 fantasy points in Week 1, but then he posted 5 straight weeks of elite or close-to-elite WR1 production: 16.8 points in Week 2, 21.2 in Week 3, 17 in Week 4, 23.9 in Week 5. He had 12.3 in Week 6 and then 21.9 in Week 7. At that point, Ferguson looked like a league winner.
But what happened over that span? In Week 3, he caught 13 passes, which is probably never happening again in the rest of his career. He scored in all of the other games. He had 4 straight games with a touchdown from Weeks 4 through 7, and in 2 of them, he had 2 touchdowns. He scored 2 more times the rest of the year, and he had only 2 games with double-digit fantasy points.
It’s a two-prong thing with Ferguson. First, the splits with CeeDee Lamb really tell the story. Last year, in the 4 games Lamb missed or mostly missed, Ferguson feasted to the tune of 18.6 fantasy points per game. With Lamb on the field, that number cratered to 8.9 fantasy points per game, which is pretty much unstartable, or something you can find streaming every week. Not a difference-maker.
I see Ferguson as a guy who is not a featured member of this passing attack. He is a fallback plan, a fail-safe. If something happens to Lamb or George Pickens, then maybe Ferguson moves up in the pecking order. But I think this year it could even be Ryan Flournoy who operates as that No. 3 option, pushing Ferguson down even further.
I’m not excited about Ferguson at all. There were a lot of empty routes last season. He was targeted on just 21.6% of his routes run, 16th in the league. Most disturbingly, his 1.27 yards per route run ranked 33rd. He’s not an efficient player. He relies exclusively on touchdowns.
I could not be less interested in Ferguson this season, even with him playing in an explosive Cowboys offense. Even if you’re punting tight end, just draft someone else.
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Jake Ferguson’s Week 1 Fantasy Outlook
Analysis provided by PFN Analyst Kyle Soppe.
It feels like a lifetime ago now, but do you remember early last season when Ferguson was a top-5 producer at the position in 4 of 5 weeks?
As we saw George Pickens get comfortable in this offense, the Ferguson production train hit the skids, and while he’s a valuable piece of this offense when it comes to moving the chains, I’m not confident that we saw that PPR scam version of him return for extended stretches this season.
He finished last season with 12 targets earned and 7 receptions in Dallas’ final 4 games (46 receiving yards). That’s a floor that we didn’t think was possible given the potency of this offense, but we were proved wrong and now have to weigh that sort of outcome with a ceiling that feels limited for a player that had more touchdowns last season than in the first three of his career combined.
He’s a fringe starter this week, and that’s about as high as I anticipate having him for the foreseeable future. The G-Men allowed the sixth-highest touchdown rate on short passes in 2025, so if you want to chase a short score, be my guest, but that’s a dangerous way to live given that he has at least three teammates capable of exposing that weakness and plenty of tight ends who are more critical to the success of their team’s offense.
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Where Ferguson Ranks Among 2026 Tight Ends
- Harold Fannin Jr. | CLE
- Kyle Pitts Sr. | ATL
- Dalton Kincaid | BUF
- Isaiah Likely | NYG
- Juwan Johnson | NO
- Jake Ferguson | DAL
- Dallas Goedert | PHI
- Travis Kelce | KC
- Mark Andrews | BAL
- Chig Okonkwo | WAS
- Hunter Henry | NE
Check the full position group on PFN's 2026 PPR Tight End Board.
