Should You Fade Drue Tranquill in 2023?

Photo: Denny Medley, USA Today Sports

The hardest part of managing an IDP fantasy football team is navigating the players to build around and the players better suited for short-term stints on your roster. In dynasty formats, a build-around player is a guy you know will be the cornerstone of his team for years to come. A player who shows us that compiling statistics is second nature! He rarely has an “off” game and will be your “set and forget” guy throughout the season. Usually, these players finish in the top six or seven at their respective positions and are within a certain age range, usually between 24-28 years old. A player that meets these exact criteria, but should be avoided, is Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Drue Tranquill.

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Tranquill's 2022 Season

Tranquill is coming off a monster of a season. He compiled 144 total tackles, five sacks, and two turnovers as the man in the middle for the Los Angeles Chargers. Depending on your league’s scoring rules, he was better than all but five or six linebackers in the entire league. He set career highs in every statistical category but recovered fumbles, and he is just 27 years young. He had no fewer than five tackles per game and had seven games with double-digit stops. He didn’t miss a single game in 2022 and was playing the final year of his rookie contract, so the motivation was about as high as you will see from a young player. He failed to receive a second contract from the Chargers and, this past offseason, signed a one-year deal with the Kansas City Chiefs. It’s one thing for Tranquill not to get resigned to his former team, this often happens to linebackers in today’s NFL. The position just isn’t a priority to allocate funds from the salary cap. In what is becoming a more pass-heavy league, the inside linebacker has less value than 10-15 years ago. The part managers need to take notice of is how cheap the Chiefs got Tranquill for: one year, $2.45 million guaranteed. This compensation may as well be pennies in the grand scheme of capology. This is one of many reasons to avoid Tranquill this season.

Caution Required

Managers need to take notice of some things before drafting or trying to acquire Tranquill. The first is his true value at this point in his career. When he was the inside linebacker for the Los Angeles Chargers, he had little to no competition for stats in the role he was playing. This is a blessing for managers who had Tranquill last season, but there is about to be a serious reality check this season. He is now second fiddle to elite IDP linebacker Nick Bolton. Bolton has been a must-have in IDP since his rookie season and has yet to finish with less than 110 total tackles. Last season was his best yet, with 179 total tackles. When you insert a player like Tranquill here, the real story will be how much Bolton will drop off more so than how great Tranquill will be there. We do not have a great track record of two viable linebackers on the Kansas City defense. Just like Highlander, there can be only one! Unfortunately for fans of Tranquill, that one is Bolton.

What we have here is a player (Tranquill) coming off his best season and joining a new team where a player who plays his same position (Bolton) had an even better year. If this wasn’t enough to scare you away from over-drafting Tranquill, what about the fact that 2022 appears to be the outlier for his four-year career? Prior to last season, Tranquil had never achieved greater than 76 total tackles and had just one career sack and turnover to his name. Last season he popped, no doubt, and in 2020 he missed the entire season with a fractured ankle suffered in Week 1. So all we have to go by are 2019, which was his rookie season, and 2021, his first back from a debilitating injury. In those seasons, he averaged 76 total tackles and 0.5 sacks. This is far from a top-six talent.