ESPN has extremely bold prediction for Raiders TE Brock Bowers in 2026
· Yahoo Sports
It is not a leap to think Brock Bowers will return to prominence this season as one of -- if not THE best tight end in football. He is just a season removed from being heralded as such as a rookie in 2024. But ESPN's Ben Solak just took those expectations to a bold new level.
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Solak is predicting Bowers will win the AP Offensive Player of the Year.
Just how bold is such a prediction? Well, Solak says it all with the first sentence of his explanation.
A tight end has never won the AP Offensive Player of the Year.
The closest a tight end has ever gotten to OPOY honors was fourth in the voting, when Travis Kelce got three first place votes back in 2020. Yet, somehow Solak sees even bigger things for Bowers this season.
The basis for the prediction starts with new head coach Klint Kubiak, who was the offensive mastermind behind the Seahawks offense last season that produced reigning OPOY Jaxon Smith-Njigba.
The thing is, though, JSN is a wide receiver. One of three positions that always wins the award along with running back, and, of course, quarterback.
Solak goes on to suggest that the improvement at quarterback for the Raiders between Kirk Cousins and Fernando Mendoza should have Bowers surpassing the previous record numbers he put up in 2024 while catching passes from the lackluster duo of Aidan O'Connell and Gardner Minshew.
Vast improvement to be certain. But this is still a pretty hard sell, to be honest. And Solak seems to recognize this despite his prediction.
Bowers can't just feast as the lone option on a losing team, though. That's what [Trey] McBride did -- he set the tight end record with 126 receptions last season, beating the previous mark by 10 catches. But nobody cared about the Cardinals, so his draw against Smith-Njigba (and Christian McCaffrey and Puka Nacua and Bijan Robinson) was really tough. It will take a soft draw for Bowers to emerge, but given the attention with Mendoza in hand, I think he'll see enough shine that he wins this award with a record-setting season of his own. McBride did it with catches, but I think Bowers might be better suited to best Kelce's 1,416 receiving yards from 2020.
Essentially, the Raiders would have to also be a winning -- or at least highly competitive -- team for Bowers to get that kind of recognition. And even then, using Kelce's 2020 season as the marker isn't helpful considering, as noted at the beginning, Kelce's elite season STILL didn't even land in the top three in voting.
That being said, based on the records Bowers broke as a rookie, I suppose if anyone can make this kind of history, it's him.
Whether Bowers were to go on to make history as the first ever tight end to win AP Offensive Player of the Year, there is certainly plenty of reason to believe the dynamic third year tight end will put up huge numbers this season for the Raiders.
This article originally appeared on Raiders Wire: ESPN has extremely bold prediction for Raiders TE Brock Bowers in 2026