The star tight end is the only player in the tight end room who is a

lock to play the position this September" />Skip to main contentclockmenumore-arrownoyesHorizontal - WhiteArrowhead PrideArrowhead Pride | Kansas City Chiefs Schedule Demarcus Robinson Jersey , News, Roster and StatsLog In or Sign UpLog InSign UpSeriesLatest NewsFanpostsFanshotsCommunityAboutStubHubMoreAll 322 blogs on Horizontal - WhiteSeries Stagner ThingsLottery Tickets ’19Summer of SpagsDixon’s MailbagLatest News Fanposts Most recentMost activeFanshots Community Community GuidelinesContactAbout StubHub ✕Filed under:Kansas City Chiefs NewsChiefs tight end Travis Kelce should be ready to play by training campNew,18commentsThe star tight end is the only player in the tight end room who is a lock to play the position this SeptemberCDTShareTweetShareShareChiefs tight end Travis Kelce should be ready to play by training campPhoto by Jamie Squire/Getty ImagesThe Kansas City Chiefs now have seven tight ends on their 90-man roster — Travis Kelce is a lock as the starter. The Chiefs will carry two — possibly three — tight ends on the final roster when the season begins.So six players are competing for one or two roster spots — the heaviest competition at any position on the team — but right now, the Chiefs are having trouble putting very many of them on the field for OTAs.Thus far, Kelce has been held out of offseason practices because of the ankle surgery he had after last season.But according to head coach Andy Reid — who spoke to the media after the team’s OTA session on Thursday — two more were sidelined.“There are a couple of guys that are nicked up just a little bit,” he said. “Blake Bell’s back locked up on him — just spasms — so he didn’t practice today.”Bell, a former Oklahoma Sooner quarterback who converted to tight end in his final college season, came to the Chiefs after stints with the Jacksonville Jaguars, Minnesota Vikings and San Francisco 49ers — who drafted him in the fourth round of the 2015 NFL Draft.But Reid said another one of his bevy of tight ends was kept out of practice on Thursday.“Deon Yelder, the tight end, had a little bit of a hamstring strain,” Reid said. “He’s just precautionary — keeping him out today and we’ll see how things go down the road with him.”Yelder — an undrafted free agent out of Western Kentucky — spent the first part of the 2018 season on the New Orleans Saints practice squad.Released by the Saints in early October, he was signed to the Chiefs practice squad and promoted to the active roster a few weeks later.He saw special teams action in three games last season.That leaves John Lovett, David Wells, Joe Fortson and Nick Keizer — the latter signed just a week ago after being released by the Baltimore Ravens.“We just signed a new kid, Keizer Sammy Watkins Jersey , and actually he’s doing a nice job,” Reid told the press on Thursday. “Wells is in there too doing well. We’ve mixed both of our fullbacks in to take some reps there and they’re doing a nice job likewise.”Both of their fullbacks?Former Green Bay Packers fullback Aaron Ripkowski had been one of the Chiefs’ early offseason signings, but he was released several weeks ago; only longtime Chief Anthony Sherman is listed as a fullback on the current Chiefs roster.Reid’s words suggested that Lovett — another converted quarterback whom the Chiefs had previously said was getting work at the fullback position — might be seen by Chiefs coaches as more of a fullback than a tight end (perhaps even an H-back, if you will).Reid’s next statement amplified that idea.“If you’re going to play fullback here you’re also going to have to play tight end,” Reid said. “All in all, they’re getting great work. With Travis not being able to practice they’re getting great work.”Reid’s statements provide some hints about how the Chiefs might intend to structure the 53-man roster in 2019.The Chiefs carried just two tight ends in 2018, but they could decide to keep an extra one this season if that player could also serve as a fullback.Or to put it another way, the Chiefs could decide to keep two fullbacks — one of whom could also be used as a tight end.As always, Reid likes to keep opposing defenses guessing. That kind of versatility built into his offensive roster could add another layer of uncertainty to what the Chiefs might do when a particular group of offensive players is on the field.But one thing remains certain: Kelce will be the starter at tight end.Reid was asked if Kelce would be ready for the mandatory minicamp that begins June 11.“I don’t think next week,” Reid replied. “I think you’ll probably see him at training camp.”New for the 2018 season: True power rankings For me — like many Arrowhead Pride readers — AP’s weekly rundown of power rankings is must-reading during the season.I know perfectly well that power rankings are meaningless since they represent nothing more than the opinion of some NFL pundit.But I can’t help myself.I read them anyway.Going into the 2017 season, I started wondering: Is there a way to do it better?Is there a way to make power rankings more meaningful? And wouldn’t it be nice if you could look at them side by side, and more easily compare rankings from different sources?So I spent the season collecting data and experimenting with it, revising my methods and calculations as I went along.You’ll see the results starting this season, as we present Arrowhead Pride True Power Rankings — a more complete look at the state of the NFL each week.Part 1: Pundit Power RankingsOn Tuesdays — just as we’ve always done — we’ll give you power rankings from a variety of sources, including each pundit’s comments about the Chiefs.But we’ll present the rankings side-by-side, so you can more easily compare how different sources view each NFL team.Then we’ll add an extra feature.We’ll aggregate the rankings into a single ranking based on the power rankings from ESPN Anthony Hitchens Jersey , Sports Illustrated’s MMQB, NFL.com, the Sporting News, Yahoo.com and CBS.com.Why these particular six?All are well-respected national sources that we know will publish power rankings each week.The rankings published by two of them — ESPN and MMQB — represent the opinion of all their writers, rather than just one.Since we could consider their group opinion as more valid, our calculations will weight those two more heavily than the other four.As an example of what this will look like, here’s what the Pundit Power Rankings looked like going into Week 17 last season.Pundit Power Rankings for Week 17Chiefs AFC West Teams Other AFC TeamsLike all the tables we’ll show you each week, rows for the Chiefs will be in one color, rows for AFC West teams will be in another color, and rows for the remaining AFC teams will be in yet another.This immediately draws your eye not only to the information about your favorite team, but also to the teams that will most concern the Chiefs during the regular season: their division and conference opponents.We’ll also repeat the header row every eight rows, which will make it a little easier for you to read the table as you scroll through it, and also neatly divide the teams into quarters.Wait... did I say all the tables?I sure did.Part 2: Cruncher Power RankingsWe know, of course, there are other ways to evaluate the relative strength NFL teams — ones that do not depend on a sportswriter’s opinion, but instead on hard data.So on Wednesdays starting after Week 2 Chad Henne Jersey , we’ll give you NFL rankings generated by four well-known methods used by number-crunchers: ELO from FiveThirtyEight.com, DVOA from FootballOutsiders.com, SRS (for Simple Rating System) from Pro-Football-Reference.com, and PE (for Pythagorean Expectation — sometimes called expected wins) as originally adapted for pro football by Football Outsiders.All of these methods have strengths and weaknesses.All but DVOA use points scored (both for and against) as the base data for their calculations.All but PE take opponent strength into consideration.Only Elo includes how a team did in the previous season.Two of them — Elo and PE — were originally developed for different purposes, but have been adapted for pro football.There are other differences — if you’re really interested, click the links to learn more — but for our purposes, only one thing matters: they don’t depend on the personal opinion of a writer who doesn’t watch every game of every team.As you might expect, we’ll not only present these power rankings from the number-crunchers, individually, but average them together, too.Here’s what that looked like going into Week 17 last season.Cruncher Power Rankings for Week 17Chiefs AFC West Teams Other AFC TeamsYou may have noticed that the 2017 playoff teams are marked with asterisks in these first two tables.We’ve done this so you can see whether the pundits or crunchers better predicted the outcome of the 2017 playoffs.As you might expect, it’s a mixed bag.The pundits had the advantage of knowing which teams had the best shot of making the playoffs with one week to go.On the other hand, the crunchers predicted the eventual Super Bowl winner.You can also see the how pundits — in general — are influenced by quarterbacks.Going into Week 17 last year, they unanimously thought the Patriots — with Tom Brady — had the best chance to win the Super Bowl.The crunchers had more variance in their evaluations, but weren’t distracted by the fact that backup quarterback Nick Foles would be under center for the Eagles in the postseason.This is not to say that the crunchers will always be more accurate.They won’t be.But it illustrates how much fun it was for me last season, as I watched how the pundits and the crunchers agreed — and sometimes Kendall Fuller Jersey , how they disagreed.Part 3: Combined Power RankingsEach week, we’ll make it easy for you to compare how the pundits and crunchers differ by presenting their rankings side-by-side — and, of course, give you a cumulative ranking that averages them together.Combined Power Rankings for Week 17Chiefs AFC West Teams Other AFC TeamsI should note here how these rankings will be averaged together.Sharp-eyed readers may already have noticed that some of these seem... wrong.Two and six for the Steelers averages to four, and five and one for the Eagles averages to three.So why would the Steelers be ranked ahead of the Eagles?This is because we’re not averaging the rankings from each table.Instead, we’re averaging the numbers behind those rankings.In the Pundit rankings for Week 17, the Steelers average ranking was 2.25, while it was 5.25 in the Crunchers rankings.That’s an average of 3.75.The Eagles Pundit average was 5.125, and their Crunchers average was 2.5.That averages out to 3.8125.Therefore, the Steelers ranked ahead of the Eagles in the Combined rankings.But we’re not done yet.Part 4: Cruncher GradesIf you’re familiar with my past writing, you may recall that I am not a fan of statistical rankings.They can be misleading because they can only show that one number is larger (or smaller) than another — not how close they are to each other.Statisticians have a trick to fix this problem.They calculate standard deviations from average for a set of values, which is used to tell if the difference between two values from the set is statistically significant.Standard deviations from average are expressed as a number that is almost always between -3 and 3, and is usually carried out to multiple decimal points.But you’re not going to have to compare -1.6875 to 1.3496.Instead, we’ll do the same thing your school teachers did: convert them to letter grades ranging from FF (less than -3) to AA (greater than 3) — like this:The key thing to remember is that only a difference of a full letter grade (or more) is statistically significant.So if one team has a B+ and another team has a B, the difference between them is measurable, but not significant.If one team has a C and another has a D+ Eric Murray Jersey , the difference is a bit more measurable, but still not significant.But a team with a B+ grade is significantly better than one with a C+ grade.We can’t do this for Pundit rankings, because there is no numerical value behind each pundit’s opinion.But we can do it with the data underlying the Cruncher rankings, because they are numerical values.Since the Cruncher numbers are all based on entirely different systems, we can’t compare the raw numbers directly; that would be comparing apples to oranges.But by calculating standard deviations from average for each set of values, we effectively convert all of them to juicy red tomatoes — which we can compare directly.Here’s how that looked going into Week 17 last season.Cruncher Grades for Week 17Chiefs AFC West Teams Other AFC TeamsThese grades reveal an essential truth about ranking statistics of any kind: numbers that we spend a lot of time comparing sometimes don’t turn out to be significantly different from each other.While it might be true — for example — that one quarterback has a completion percentage of 60.1 and another has one of 60.4, the difference is measurable, but not necessarily significant.The same is true of ranked statistical values.We might assume — for example — that the top five rushers in the league are elite. But by grading the values this way, we might learn that only one is head and shoulders above everyone else.The other four might be merely above average.What we see here is that going into Week 17 last season, there were six teams that were roughly equivalent — at least in terms of how the crunchers evaluated them.So going into the playoffs, there really wasn’t one team that stood out as having the best chance to win it all.That might turn out to be the case in 2018, too.Or... it might not.It’s possible that when we reach Week 17, we’ll see that one or two teams are clearly above the rest of the field — or it’ll be anybody’s postseason to win.We’re looking forward to watching how it all unfolds, and hope that this weekly dive into what the pundits and crunchers think will be entertaining — and enlightening.Watch for it every Tuesday and Wednesday during the regular season on AP!