Los Angeles Rams head coach Sean McVay built his reputation on spreading the field with three receivers. Last season, he found something even better: three tight ends.
The Rams ran an NFL-record 331 offensive plays out of three-tight-end personnel in 2025, according to Sharp Football Analysis, nearly triple the next-closest team, the Steelers, who ran 145.
This volume isn’t surprising, but the efficiency is what separates it from a gimmick. Los Angeles averaged 8.4 yards per pass play with three or more tight ends on the field, a full two yards better than the 6.3 league average and among the best marks posted by any offense out of any personnel grouping last season. No team ran three-tight-end sets nearly as often as the Rams, and no team that used them with any real volume produced anywhere close to that efficiency.
The shift lines up with a broader league-wide trend, just at a different scale. NFL offenses ran two or more tight ends on 33.4% of snaps last season, the highest rate recorded this century. The Rams were its clearest proof of concept, running the personnel grouping more than double the volume of anyone else and still out-producing the field by more than two yards a play.
There’s some irony in McVay leading that shift. When he arrived in Los Angeles in 2017, he made his name pulling away from fullbacks and heavy sets in favor of 11 personnel, using versatile skill players like Robert Woods, Cooper Kupp and Puka Nacua as movement pieces who could hurt teams equally well in the run and pass game. Now Colby Parkinson, Tyler Higbee and Terrance Ferguson give him the same kind of two-way threat at tight end, and the results say he’s found an even more efficient way to force defenses into bad matchups. That’s on top of his dominant receiver game with Nacua and Davante Adams and an impressive running back duo of Kyren Williams and Blake Corum.
Parkinson enters 2026 coming off a career year — 408 yards and eight touchdowns filling in for an injured Higbee — while Higbee returns on a new two-year deal. Add rookie Max Klare, and the Rams project to keep at least four tight ends on the roster with legitimate receiving chops, arguably the deepest room in the league at the position.
That depth is exactly why the 3-TE surge looks less like a one-year outlier and more like the foundation of the 2026 offense.
This article originally appeared on Rams Wire: New stat shows just how dominant the Rams were in 3-TE sets
Reporting by Oliver G., Rams Wire / Rams Wire
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Oliver G., Rams Wire | USA TODAY Network
