Should You Fade Drue Tranquill in 2023?

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.

When to Target Tranquill

Now as always with these articles, we will not just focus on negative vibes or energy. There is a place on your roster for Tranquill, but it doesn’t need to be a highly coveted spot. His value needs to be that of a low-end LB2 or high-end LB3. The risk associated with him will not be worth the reward unless Bolton goes down or is traded. He is technically in a contract year, which is everyone’s favorite “gut feeling” metric to use, but you can only do so much work on the field in a limited capacity. Look for him to mimic the stats that we’ve seen from Willie Gay Jr recently, who last season had 87 total tackles with minimal impact elsewhere on the stat sheet. Let’s make it clear, though, there is a place on your roster for these stats. It just doesn’t need to be your first (or 15th) best linebacker pick.

Summary

Just as we need to celebrate the highs with players, we have to understand the lows and risks associated with some. Drue Tranquill has had one elite year with a team he no longer plays for. Until the information changes and we see he has the ability to recapture these numbers for the Chiefs, you need to have a better Plan A. As a low-end starter and mid-tier bench linebacker, he is worthy of a pick. But make no mistake, he will be drafted due to the name recognition and last year's stats. Your decision as a redraft manager is easy, find someone else and if he somehow falls to later rounds, snipe him there. As a dynasty manager, try to move off him while he’s still got these stats, or if you need depth, acquire him cheaply. Regardless of the trade side, you can benefit from the player here, just don’t overleverage. Drue Tranquill is an excellent example that fit matters in IDP fantasy football, his biggest issue is that his fit here minimizes his ability to score, and we all know, you can’t win if you can’t score!

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