Travis Kelce, George Kittle's tight end camp a reminder of Tennessee Titans' weak spot

Here is an objective, inescapable truth about the modern NFL, as spoken by All-Pro San Francisco 49ers tight end George Kittle.

"I really just think in the last 10 years is what you’ve really noticed is every playoff team, every Super Bowl team, you look at the guys and you’re like, ‘Wow, there is an elite tight end on that team that’s a focal point of that offense,' " Kittle said Tuesday from Tight End University, the Nashville-based camp he hosts every year along with Kansas City Chiefs star Travis Kelce and FOX NFL analyst Greg Olsen.

Kittle's right by just about any metric.

From 2018 to 2023, there were 28 tight ends who had at least 800 receiving yards in a season. Those players' teams on average won 10 games in those seasons.

There are 21 instances since 2018 of a tight end catching seven or more touchdowns in a season. Their teams won an average of 10.3 games per year.

There are also 21 instances of a tight end catching 75 or more passes in a season since 2018. Their teams won an average of 10.4 games per year.

MEET THE COACH: Melting cleats, walking dogs: Inside Lori Locust's journey from women's football to NFL, Tennessee Titans

Kelce, Kittle, Olsen and Rob Gronkowski have accounted for 16 of the 19 All-Pro nods among tight ends in the past 10 seasons. And, oh yeah, teams featuring the four have appeared in nine of the past 10 Super Bowls.

There's an obvious "causation doesn't equal correlation" conversation that needs to be had about this trend. The four combined to play with a whopping 54 other All-Pro teammates from 2014 to 2023 and for coaches who have combined to win AP NFL Coach of the Year eight times. The best teams have good tight ends, sure, but that doesn't necessarily mean the best teams are so because they have good tight ends.

Tight ends and the Tennessee Titans

Which brings us to the Tennessee Titans, the NFL team that plays just a couple of miles from the Vanderbilt practice fields where Kelce, Kittle and Olsen host their camp. There were 101 instances of a tight end gaining 500 or more receiving yards in a season in that 2018-23 time frame. Only one of them — Chig Okonkwo's 528 yards in 2023 — came from a Titans player.

The only move the team made at tight end this offseason was signing journeyman Nick Vannett, who's hardly a receiving threat; Vannett has only five more catches in eight NFL seasons than Okonkwo does in two. And it's not as if first-year Titans coach Brian Callahan has a track record of favoring his tight ends. Callahan hasn't been part of a team with a 500-yard tight end since 2018, when he was the Oakland Raiders' quarterbacks coach.

None of this means Okonkwo (or 2023 fifth-round pick Josh Whyle) can't break out and be the next great tight end. Kelce didn't have his breakout season until Year 4 and Olsen didn't have his first 1,000-yard campaign until Year 8. And tight ends like Julius Thomas, Eric Ebron and Jared Cook were all dependable, productive players on the Denver, Detroit and Oakland teams Callahan coached on before Cincinnati.

But there's a difference between dependable and productive, and the game-changing caliber players Kittle is talking about when he says "elite" tight end play. Those are the kinds of players who've played deep into January and February in the past decade. They're the kinds of players every NFL team wants but only the select few have.

ROSTER PROJECTION: Projecting Tennessee Titans 53-man roster: Grading minicamp standouts most likely to make it

Nick Suss is the Titans beat writer for The Tennessean. Contact Nick at nsuss@gannett.com. Follow Nick on X, the platform formerly called Twitter, @nicksuss.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Travis Kelce, George Kittle's Nashville camp reminder of Titans' TE situation