While Travis Kelce continues to dominate the conversation when it comes to the Kansas City Chiefs’ tight end position, he isn’t the only tight end whose future is up in the air this offseason. While most of the NFL world focuses on whether Travis Kelce will continue his Hall of Fame career in 2026, the Chiefs have to decide if they believe Noah Gray is the heir to the tight end position, either this season or in the future. Unfortunately for Gray, he didn’t look up to the job in 2025.
Noah Gray was a fifth-round draft pick out of Duke in 2021. At the time, the scouting report on Gray was that he was a good possession-type receiving tight end but needed to work on his blocking. To Gray’s credit, he did just that, and in his second NFL season (2022), he earned the Chiefs’ No. 2 tight end job and has held it ever since. During that time, he has proven himself valuable as a solid blocker and an underrated pass-catching option that frequently flew under opposing teams’ radar.
Thanks to that combination of blocking and pass-catching ability, the Chiefs rewarded Gray with a three-year, $18 million contract extension that would keep him in Kansas City through 2027. While $6 million per year isn’t a huge deal by NFL standards, it did put Gray in starting tight end range. Gray’s $6.97 million cap hit for next year is currently set to be the 26th-highest among tight ends. Most believed that this deal all but ensured Gray’s status as the heir to Kansas City’s starting tight end job when Kelce decided to hang up the cleats.
The Chiefs may need to look for someone other than Noah Gray to be Kelce's long-term replacement at tight end.
The problem is that last season, which was the first year of the three-year extension, was Gray’s worst season since he earned the No. 2 tight end job for the Chiefs. Look at his numbers over the last four seasons.
- 2022: 17 games, 28 receptions, 299 yards, 10.7 yards per reception, 1 touchdown
- 2023: 17 games, 28 receptions, 305 yards, 10.9 yards per reception, 2 touchdowns
- 2024: 17 games, 40 receptions, 437 yards, 10.9 yards per reception, 5 touchdowns
- 2025: 16 games, 21 receptions, 178 yards, 8.5 yards per reception, 0 touchdowns
Gray clearly had his worst season on offense. Part of that was a reduction in routes run. He averaged 301.7 routes from 2022–2024 and then ran 262 routes in 2025. Maybe that was because the Chiefs were trying to get more wide receivers involved. Maybe it was because they needed Gray to stay in and block more often on passing plays (although Pro Football Focus only credited him with 47 pass-blocking snaps all season). However, the Chiefs were hurting for pass-catching production this past season, and instead of being part of the solution, Gray had his worst season in terms of production since earning consistent playing time.
To put into perspective how the drop in Gray’s production ranks him in the NFL, look at the company his production placed him in over the past two seasons. In 2024, Gray had 40 receptions on 311 routes run. That put him in the same company as Brenton Strange (40 receptions on 279 routes), T.J. Hockenson (41 receptions on 300 routes), and Isaiah Likely (42 receptions on 312 routes). However, Gray’s 21 receptions on 262 routes in 2025 put him in the company of players like Austin Hooper (21 receptions on 196 routes) and Adam Troutman (20 receptions on 221 routes).
In fact, Gray’s production was worse than that of Hooper and Troutman—two veteran, replacement-level journeymen tight ends—because he ran significantly more routes to put up the same production. Gray had the least offensive production of any tight end in the NFL last season who ran at least 250 routes. The closest to his lack of production on that many routes was Tommy Tremble, who had 27 receptions on 273 routes for Carolina.
When you are putting up offensive production similar to players like Brenton Strange, T.J. Hockenson, and Isaiah Likely, it is easy to justify your status as the heir to Travis Kelce. However, when you’re producing at a level similar to journeymen veterans like Austin Hooper and Adam Troutman—or a blocking specialist like Tommy Tremble—that role becomes much harder to justify.
Was this drop in production due to a decline in Gray’s play? Was Gray battling an injury this season that we didn’t know about? He suffered a concussion in Week 12 that caused him to miss one game, but his production before and after that injury was about the same. Did Andy Reid and/or Patrick Mahomes simply start to lose faith in Gray and prioritize other options in the passing game? Whatever the reason for the drop-off, the Chiefs have to think long and hard about the future of the tight end position.
Hopefully, Chiefs fans hear soon that Travis Kelce has officially decided to play one more season for Kansas City. If that happens, it will give the Chiefs a little less pressure to have their plan for replacing Kelce finalized, but it doesn’t change the fact that there are many more questions about that plan after Noah Gray’s down year in 2025. Will they continue to trust Gray? Will they look to draft a talented young tight end like Kenyon Sadiq in the 2026 NFL Draft? Only time will tell.