Dynasty Faceoff Keep Trade Cut Dynasty 2025: Week 3
It’s time for the third edition of Dynasty Faceoff – Keep Trade Cut Dynasty for Week 3. Each week during the NFL regular season, we will analyze a position group from strictly a dynasty fantasy football perspective.
Using various dynasty rankings throughout the season, we’ll differentiate the value between three assets within that position group. The players will be ranked consecutively and of similar age(within three years), providing an outlook on who to keep, trade, or cut in your dynasty leagues.
For this exercise, the player who would be deemed the most valuable for the near and long term will be the “Keep”, while our player to “Trade” holds a tremendous near-term value. However, it may be prudent to maximize their trade value at this time.
Finally, the “Cut” is the asset that holds the least amount of current value in the trio, and is a player who may be seeing a diminished role on his team or shows signs of value regression soon.
Keep Trade Cut Dynasty 2025: Week 3
In this Week 3 Keep, Trade, Cut outlook, we’ll be looking at three tight ends. All of which have shown fantasy output at some point in their careers. Two of the tight ends, Jake Ferguson and T.J. Hockenson, have each registered career top-10 finishes in their careers. Meanwhile Isaiah Likely currently sits as the TE1 in half PPR to start 2024. These three tight ends also happen to be the TE9, TE10, and TE11 in the current rankings on FantasyCalc.
Keep: TE9 T.J. Hockenson – Minnesota Vikings
We start the article by discussing T.J. Hockenson, who hasn’t played a snap during the 2024 season. However, he is this list’s only asset to boast multiple TE1 outputs during his career. Over the last four seasons, the only time Hockenson didn’t finish as a top 5 producer at tight end was when he missed the final four games of the 2021-2022 NFL season. Although he is not expected to return to the lineup until halfway through this current season, Hockenson’s steady career output and back-to-back 900+ yard seasons should give managers confidence when he returns.
Hockenson may very well have been the TE1 overall in dynasty fantasy football leagues coming into this season. Unfortunately, an ACL and MCL tear late in 2023 curtailed the upswing in his value.
This current TE9 value isn’t a proper projection of what Hockenson can provide when healthy. He’s still young, as he just turned 27 this summer. However, he has plenty of time to return to the very top. Additionally, the quarterback situation with Sam Darnold and the passing game look markedly better than the outlook would’ve had us believe before the season. However, now the Vikings are 2-0 and appear capable of competing for the playoffs.
This has all set up well for Hockenson, and it still may take two or three games to return to game speed. Ultimately, he should be fully ready to produce once the fantasy football playoffs are upon us. Hockenson is the greatest tight end talent on this list, and will likely find himself climbing these ranks again as he gets healthy.
Trade: TE10 Isaiah Likely – Baltimore Ravens
The second tight end and our candidate to trade in Week 3, also happens to be the current top tight end in half PPR formats. This TE1 status was buoyed by the Week 1 explosion in which Isaiah Likely took over the Ravens receiving game. All in all, he caught nine balls and posted his second career 100-yard game.
This sent a shockwave throughout the dynasty community. More importantly, dynasty managers are still attempting to understand this current tight end room in Baltimore. Likely followed up his huge Week 1 performance with a three-target disappointment in Week 2, only accruing 26 yards in the process. Despite that, he finds himself as the current TE10 in these rankings, which means managers are showing clear faith in the talent.
Certainly, the talent is there with Likely. However, with Mark Andrews getting healthier, the Ravens tight end position may end up cannibalizing each other for fantasy football, as the season goes along. To add to that, Andrews has always had a floor and been a good fantasy asset. However, he also can have lower-scoring weeks when the game script doesn’t provide for red zone passing touchdowns.
Recently, the Ravens have put their emphasis on defense and rushing. While Andrews was able to establish a floor as the top pass-getter, recent newcomer Zay Flowers projects as the volume receiver of the future. Likely is a fantastic best ball asset. However, he also may have more bust weeks than boom, if the Week 2 performance is any indication. The athleticism and talent are there, but it may be best to instead get a TE1 price for Likely. In the end, he will find it difficult to finish as a top tight end each week in this offense.
Cut: TE11 Jake Ferguson – Dallas Cowboys
We finish this list with another player recouping his health and one we should expect to return in the coming weeks. Dallas tight end Jake Ferguson sat out Week 2 with an injury. Meanwhile, the Cowboys were dismantled by the New Orleans Saints in the Cowboys home opener.
Ferguson’s five target Week 1 feels around his standard and what to expect from him along his career. During the 2023 season in which Ferguson finished TE8, he had 102 targets across 17 games, good for an average of 6 targets per contest. Overall, that’s not bad for the tight end position. Additionally, he isn’t returning to a team with the same level of rushing threat that they had in the past either.
Moving forward, Ferguson’s role is secure on this Cowboys team for now. However, while the focus will be on him and CeeDee Lamb in the passing game, just how much of that passing game will open up in 2024 remains to be seen.
Unfortunately for Ferguson, he doesn’t have multiple TE1 finishes in his back pocket like Hockenson. He also doesn’t have the athletic upside of an asset such as Likely. While he may have a game or two where the opposition keys on Lamb, and Ferguson can boom, predicting that week to week feels futile. While the five targets in Week 1 aren’t a problem, the 15-yard output is worrying. In the end, he will have to be a touchdown-savant in the red zone to return that TE1 value. This year, the Cowboys may just not have the offensive dynamism for him to repeat his 2023 performance.
At the end of the day, the tight end rankings are consistently changing across an entire season, let alone in dynasty fantasy football leagues. In three weeks, we very well could be talking about players such as Tucker Kraft and Cade Otton at the back end of these TE1 rankings. We could also be talking about Hockenson returning from injury and ready to make an impact, which is the hope and projection with him as the keeper in this article.
Patience at the tight end position is important in dynasty football leagues. However, Hockenson is a clear tier up from Likely and Ferguson. FantasyCalc appears to get right in Week 3’s tight end rankings, with the Keep, Trade, and Cut appearing to be subsequent values in this list. Come back next week as we take a look at the quarterback position for the first time in these 2024-2025 outlooks.
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