10. Daniel Bellinger
When Darren Waller is healthy, you don't need your TE2 to be anything special. But "when he's healthy" has long been a caveat for Waller, who has played a full 16 games just twice in his eight-year NFL career.
And even if we're ignoring the need for a TE2 to be able to start when Waller is out, you still need them to be better than Daniel Bellinger.
After flashing some upside as a rookie, Bellinger had a really rough 2023 campaign. A quick surface-level glance at his stats might look good — 10.2 yards per catch, and 9.2 yards per target. Decent efficiency, right?
But when you factor in down-and-distance considerations, for example in Pro-Football-Reference's "success rate" metric, that disappears. Bellinger had only a 39.3% success rate.
Catching passes is only part of the equation for a tight end, but Bellinger wasn't good as a blocker either. PFF gave him a 56.9 run blocking and 45.4 pass blocking grade on the year.
A little rookie-season success from 2022 will certainly keep Bellinger in town until training camp, but being a late-offseason cut to save about $1 million in cap space could easily be in the cards if he loses a battle for the TE2 spot.