The volume held. The finishing did not. Whether 2025 was the player breaking or the situation breaking decides what he is worth at 185.1 overall.
Cade Otton scored 122.2 fantasy points in 2025. The volume he earned was worth 147.1 — he finished 24.9 points BELOW what his own usage justified. That is a different problem from losing the job, and it is the single most important thing to understand before drafting him at 185.1 overall.
Rather than reading a season average, it is worth finding the point the season actually turned. Our shift detector flags in-season changes large enough to clear a statistical threshold, then asks what moved around them.
The largest single move was Week 5: target share went up from 10.5 to 19.1, an 82.7% change, at 3.11 standard deviations. The cause was structural — the play-calling changed. He also missed Weeks 3, 9, 15.
Year over year the engine classifies 2025 as a role that shrank. That is the label to carry into the projection, because it separates a player who lost snaps from one who kept them and converted worse.
He finished 8.15 points per game on 81 targets — down 16.2% from his 2024 rate with TB. Every part of that is real and none of it is in dispute.
What is worth separating is how much of it he earned. Expected points strip out the finishing and ask a narrower question: given the targets he drew, where they came from on the field, and how far downfield they traveled, what was that usage worth? For 2025 the answer was 147.1 points — 9.8 per game. He scored 24.9 FEWER than that, a 16.9% shortfall.
The expected line underneath the season was 58.4 catches for 607 yards and 4.7 touchdowns — and he came in under it.
Against the expected line, he finished 59 catches, 572 receiving yards, 1 touchdowns — against 58.4, 607, 4.7 expected.
84% of the entire shortfall came from touchdowns alone. He hit 21% of his expected touchdowns, against 101% of his expected catches and 94% of his expected receiving yards.
That matters because touchdowns are the least repeatable part of a scoring line. Volume and yards reflect a role; touchdowns reflect a role plus a quarterback putting the ball where it can be caught in a nine-yard window. A player who holds his catches and yards while losing five touchdowns has not lost his job — he has lost the coin flips.
That distinction matters more than the raw finish. A player who loses his role posts a low score and a low expected score. Cade Otton posted a low score on an expected total of 147.1 — 9.8 points a game of earned opportunity. The targets were still coming. What went wrong happened after the ball was in the air.
Not one of his 15 games cleared 25 points. His best was 22.4 in Week 18. For a player who had cleared it routinely before 2025, that is the clearest single symptom of the year — not a change in what he was asked to do, a change in what came of it.
A steady floor has its own value, but this was not a floor season by choice. 10 games came in under 10 points, including Week 1 against ATL (0) and Week 2 against HOU (5.5).
The three largest overshoots — Week 18 (+6.1), Week 5 (+3), Week 17 (+0) — are the same games. The spikes were not extra volume. They were finishing.
Not one of his 4 seasons is flagged as running hot. 2 came in below what the usage justified: 2022 (-18.3%), 2025 (-16.9%). Across all 4 he has scored 57.5 points fewer than his usage was worth.
The reflexive read on a down year is decline. But the direction of the miss matters: finishing BELOW expectation is the more correctable of the two errors, because the hard part — earning the volume — is the part that held.
But an expected-points model has a specific blind spot, and it is worth naming: it converts usage at league-average rates. A target twenty yards downfield is worth what the average receiver does with a target twenty yards downfield. If a player is reliably better than average at winning a particular kind of target, he will beat the model every single year, and calling that luck is just mislabelling a skill.
So the question is not whether he missed the number. It is whether there is a mechanism.
Across 330 targets and four seasons, he has been a fundamentally different receiver depending on what the defense played. Against man he has caught 59.5% for 5.37 yards per target and -0.006 expected points added per target. Against zone: 73.1%, 7.64 yards, 0.209 EPA.
That is a gap of -0.215 EPA per target on a sample of 111 man targets against 216 zone. The catch rate goes the other way — he catches more against zone — which is exactly what you would expect from a receiver whose value is in winning contested downfield throws rather than in finding soft spots underneath.
The shell detail sharpens it. Cover 2 is the look he has faced most: 87 targets, 7.72 yards per target, 0.203 EPA. His best is Cover 3 at 0.267 on 62 targets.
The weakness is specific. Against 2-Man he has caught 54.5% for 4.09 yards a target and -0.368 EPA across 22 looks — a gap of 0.6 expected points a target between his best coverage and his worst.
This does not prove the overshoot repeats. It does mean the pattern has a stated cause rather than being a coin that keeps landing heads.
Across 55 graded prop lines, he has gone over 47.3% of the time. On receiving yards specifically the number is 44.4% across 27 lines, missing the posted number by an average of 14.8%.
That is close enough to a coin flip that the market has him fairly priced on his primary market. There is no edge to claim in either direction.
Touchdowns are the control. His anytime-TD market implied a 28.8% rate and he converted at 11.1% — a gap of -17.7 points, which is worth noting.
Tampa Bay returns 4 of 6 continuity slots — qb1, rb1, te1, hc — with Baker Mayfield at quarterback, Todd Bowles as head coach and Zac Robinson calling it. The offense projects to 33.1 pass attempts a game at medium confidence.
The pie is stable. His slice is the question. Our share model has him at 11.8% against the 17.1% he ran, with a range of 10.8% to 13.8%. The biggest competing claim on that pie is Emeka Egbuka at 20.2%, 8.4 points ahead of him.
That number is built from 25 comparable players — same age band, same prior share, same team, same coordinator — not from a depth chart. The closest three went Dalton Schultz 14.6% to 17.2%, Tyler Conklin 14.8% to 15.5%, Noah Fant 14.8% to 9.2%. Two held, one did not.
Across 4,488 player-seasons we swept every stat for whether it predicts NEXT year's points, and kept only the ones that replicated in all five. target share (r 0.247), WOPR (r 0.218), air-yards share (r 0.142) carry. receiving EPA per game (r -0.127) and yards per target (r -0.114) and week-to-week volatility (r -0.075) run negative — a player who was hyper-efficient on low volume tends to come back down, so a gaudy per-touch number is a warning rather than a selling point.
So the figures worth weighing for him: a 17.4% target share, 11.6% of the air yards, a WOPR of 0.34, a 93.6% snap share. He averaged 3.92 yards of separation, with +1.9 YAC over expected.
Vegas sets an implied total for every team every week, and some offenses beat theirs systematically. Over 111 games, TB has come in +0.97 points against its own implied total, clearing it in 49% of weeks.
That is close to neutral — the offense performs about where the market expects, so there is no environment bonus or penalty to apply to him either way.
One related finding worth carrying: across 1,280 cases we measured what happens after a team's implied total slides, and the correlation is -0.37 — negative, meaning the market over-corrects. A falling team total is more often a buying window than a warning.
Our board has him at 102.8 points, 6.8 per game across 15.2 expected games — 42.7 catches, 415 yards, 3.1 touchdowns. That is TE5, 179 overall, and -52 points of value over a replacement starter.
It is a step down from 2025, and the reason is volume rather than efficiency. The projection assumes he keeps doing what he does on slightly fewer looks.
The books do not agree on him. Cade Otton is a board split: ESPN takes him ~170, Sleeper lets him slide to ~212 (41.6-pick gap). That 41.6-pick gap between ESPN and Sleeper is the practical thing to act on: in a Sleeper-priced room he is available later than his consensus number suggests.
He goes at 185.1 overall on consensus, and the books are far apart — 41.6 picks between cheapest and priciest, which is a real value window. He is latest on sleeper and earliest on espn: sleeper 211.9, espn 170.3, underdog 190.9, cbs 173.1.
He goes at 185.1 and our board has him 179. That is 6.1 picks of discount on a TE5 projection — you are getting the TE5 outcome at a price the room has set below it.
The case for: a 49% boom rate.
The case against: a 49% bust rate; 3 games missed in the anchor season.
The call: take him at his ADP and do not talk yourself out of it.
Ask the Coach about Cade Otton Every number in this piece, plus your league's roster and scoring, in one answer.Expected points are computed from realized usage — targets, air yards and field position — against league-average conversion, not from projections. Prop records cover 55 graded lines. Projections are anchored to consensus with our engine applied as a capped tilt; the raw engine figure is stated where it differs. Nothing here is betting advice.