With Dwayne Allen’s continued position on the shelf, the Jack Doyle show rolls on as the Colts host Kansas City. Doyle is taking the Coby Fleener role in this offense. The role of “just okay, not great tight end who is the apple of Andrew Luck’s eye for some reason.” In the past, when the oft-injured Allen would go down, Fleener would rise to the ranks of usable TE1 production. So far this season, Doyle is following the same pattern, a pattern that he will not continue this week.[embedit snippet=”jeff-ads”]
You wouldn’t believe it given how up-and-down his season has been, but Doyle leads tight ends in touchdowns and is the #10 tight end on the season on a points-per-game basis. Given how disastrous he was after his two-touchdown game week one and before Allen went down, it’s not surprising that fantasy owners forgot about Doyle. After his huge week one, he went for a total of 116 yards the next four weeks, or hot 29 yards per game with no scores. He regressed back to the morass of useless tight ends. Then Dwayne Allen went down, and he turned back into a valuable fantasy football commodity, going for 4/53/1 and 9/78/1 in the last two weeks. In a year where the average TE12 is getting you seven fantasy points, getting 11 and 13 in consecutive weeks gets you in the conversation for every week starter.
While Doyle is on the edge of every week fantasy football starter, he isn’t quite there yet, and he takes on a Kansas City team that is quite adept at bottling up the tight end. They have given up the seventh-fewest fantasy points to the tight end this season, and like some teams in the bottom ten, they aren’t doing it by playing a bunch of scrubs. They’ve locked up Antonio Gates, Jesse James, Clive Walford and Coby Fleener so far this season. While these players aren’t weekly starters, they are the talent and opportunity to take advantage of a juicy matchup and are basically in the same tier as Doyle. Given that none of them have could capitalize on this matchup, it is highly unlikely that Doyle will be able to do so.
While Doyle will be usable more weeks than he isn’t while Dwayne Allen is banged up, this isn’t one of those weeks. The Chiefs have shown so far this year that they will shut down marginal tight ends, and that’s precisely Doyle’s tier. Compound this with the targets that will likely be consumed by Donte Moncrief and Philip Dorsett upon their returns from injury. Doyle is best left on your bench this week unless you are in particularly dire straits at tight end.