There’s a good chance you scrolled through social media prior to the 2025 season and saw some pretty funny Kyle Pitts Sr. memes circulating. They were mostly centered around Pitts not living up to his lofty expectations coming into the league. While those likely made you laugh, it was Pitts laughing on the other end in Week 15 if you played him in the fantasy football playoffs.
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The Falcons TE entered Thursday Night Football versus the Bucs as the TE12 in fantasy overall. By the end of the game, he became the TE2 in fantasy scoring, all with one fell swoop.
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Pitts had the game of his career against Tampa Bay, hauling in 11 of 12 targets for 166 yards and three touchdowns to help Atlanta pull off the upset 29-28 win.
The 40.1 fantasy points from Pitts were the highest total of any tight end all season. In fact, our own Yahoo analyst Matt Harmon rattled off some stats for Pitts after the game; you can watch his full recap here. It was the best performance from a TE in half-PPR scoring since 2002, when Broncos TE Shannon Sharpe had 39.4 fantasy points in a game versus the Chiefs. Yes, the same Sharpe you’ve seen on TV.
Pitts was started in 50% of Yahoo fantasy leagues this week, most of those matchups being playoff games for managers. Needless to say, if you faced Pitts, you’re in a major hole to begin your postseason bout. If you started Pitts, you made one of the best decisions of your life (at least in terms of fantasy). Nobody saw this coming â not even Pitts saw this coming (probably).
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This single game accounted for 7% of his entire career fantasy point production. To put that in perspective, Pitts is in his fifth NFL season and has appeared in 75 regular-season games, racking up 269 catches on 430 targets with 14 touchdowns. The three scores on TNF accounted for 21% of his career TD total. The 40.1 points came 0.1 short of matching his fantasy points from Weeks 9-14 combined.
We can go on and on and on with more stats about how insane this game was from Pitts and what it meant for fantasy playoff matchups. But we must move on and look ahead to the Sunday slate. Regardless if this is a turning point for Pitts in his up-and-down career or not, we will always remember this TNF performance.
