Colby Parkinson

Nova has Colby Parkinson 159th overall, dead last of the fantasy-relevant tight ends in Tier 7, with -41.3 VORP and a 96-point season budget (6.6 PPR/game). There's no market ADP to argue with, nobody's drafting him in enough leagues to price him, so the entire divergence story is that Nova is the only projection system with an actual number here. And that number says the 2025 touchdown binge doesn't repeat: Nova's sim gives him a 0% chance at a single 20-point week in 2026.

Where he's expected to land: Nova's median outcome (96 points, TE21-TE45 likely finish) is streaming-only production, TE2 territory in deep leagues, unrosterable most weeks everywhere else. The per-game distribution is blunt about it: 72% bust weeks (under 10 PPR), 28% solid, 0% boom. His DNA grade is H (high variance) despite that low ceiling on big weeks, which is the tell that his points come in occasional touchdown spikes, not steady target volume.

The last three seasons

The trend is real growth in targets and yards each year, but the touchdown line is the outlier: nine scores on just 71 targets in 2025, more than double his 2023-24 combined total of four touchdowns, on a target increase of only 39%. That's a scoring rate that touchdown-regression models, Nova's included, treat with real suspicion, and it's the single biggest reason his 2026 budget (96 points) sits well below what a surface-level "TE coming off 9 TDs" search suggests.

What changed for him this offseason: Nothing structural. Parkinson, 27, is entering the third and final year of the three-year, $22.5 million deal he signed with the Rams in March 2024, no restructure, no holdout, no reported injury. The stability itself is the story: he's the same blocking-first Y-tight end he's been since Los Angeles signed him away from Seattle, just now a make-good-year veteran instead of an unproven addition.

What changed around him: Sean McVay's offense didn't change coordinators, but the tight end room got more crowded. The Rams have leaned into multiple-TE personnel, and while second-year piece Terrance Ferguson is the name evaluators point to as LA's likely 2026 breakout among the pass-catching group, Turf Show Times' JB Scott argued on July 10, 2026 that Parkinson, not Ferguson, remains the key to making those heavier packages function, because Parkinson led all Rams tight ends in pass-blocking snaps both in raw total and as a share of his plays (58% of his 2025 snaps included pass-block reps). That's a real role, but it's not a fantasy role. Scott also flagged a red flag in the profile: Parkinson's seven drops in 2025 rank second on the roster in raw count, trailing only Davante Adams' nine, though on a per-target basis Parkinson's 12.1% drop rate actually tops Adams' 11.3% on a much larger target total, a correctable but real efficiency problem for a player already fighting for a target share.

What they're saying: Beyond Scott's depth-chart breakdown, the loudest Parkinson moment of the offseason cycle was actually a January playoff highlight, a Matthew Stafford-to-Parkinson touchdown in the final minute that helped the Rams survive a Wild Card upset bid from Carolina, the kind of moment that keeps a blocking tight end's name in the fantasy conversation well past his actual target share. That's the gap between vibes and volume in one sentence: a signature highlight, and still a 96-point Nova budget.

The buzz: There isn't much, and that's itself informative. Parkinson generates no meaningful fantasy-community chatter, no ADP, no breakout column, no sleeper-list mentions found in a scan of the position. The 2025 touchdown total is the only thing keeping him on redraft radars at all, and Nova's model is explicitly betting against that number holding.

Swing factors

• TD-rate regression (−30 to −40 pts): Nine scores on 71 targets is unsustainable; even a return to a normal ~3-5% TD rate on similar volume caps him near the sim's floor.
• Ferguson/Higbee/Davis Allen target competition (moderate, down): A three-deep TE room means every extra look for Ferguson is a look Parkinson doesn't get.
• Drop-rate correction (+15 to +20 pts if fixed): A 12.1% drop rate on a 70-target season is fixable technique, not a permanent role limiter, if it normalizes, some of the lost efficiency comes back as catchable-target conversion.
• Contract-year effort/leverage (small, up): Final year of his deal, extra incentive to show he's more than a blocker.

If everything goes right: Parkinson's drop rate cleans up, McVay keeps trusting him in the red zone the way he did in the Panthers game, and target competition from Ferguson stays theoretical rather than real, Parkinson approaches Nova's simulated ceiling of roughly 160.6 points, a low-end TE1 season built on schedule-luck touchdowns rather than target share. Nova prices that outcome at 4% (P(tier-1)).

If everything goes wrong: The touchdown rate reverts hard, Ferguson and a healthier Higbee eat into his passing-down snaps, and Parkinson settles into the blocking-only role the numbers already suggest is his floor, the 36.3-point season Nova's sim has at the bottom of the range, which is closer to his 2023 Seattle line than his 2025 Rams output. Given a 72% weekly bust rate, this is closer to the median week than the tail.

Nova's edge: The obvious story, "TE coming off 9 touchdowns", is exactly the story Nova refuses to tell. A 0% boom rate paired with a 72% bust rate on a player who scored nine times last season is the clearest touchdown-regression call on the board at the position, and it's the kind of claim a counting-stats site has no mechanism to make. The real edge is simple: do not pay for last year's touchdown total when the current range says the weekly floor is still fragile.

The bottom line: Parkinson is a streaming-only TE2 in deep leagues, not a draftable asset in anything shallower than 14-team, two-TE formats. If he's on your board at all, treat him as a Ferguson-injury or Higbee-injury contingency, not a plan. Grade this in January: if Parkinson finishes outside TE21-TE45 in a full season, Nova's tier-6 call on a 9-touchdown holdover was wrong, and if he does land in that range, the model's touchdown-regression bet was the right side of the argument.