Buffalo Bills tight end Jackson Hawes had a really good rookie season in 2025, and an NFL.com writer recently gave the thunderous blocking tight end his props in a recent article on underappreciated players in the league.
Shout out to NJT34 for throwing the link into The Feed yesterday.
The 25-year-old second-year pro was a fifth-round pick out of Georgia Tech, where, of course, he thrived as a road-grading blocker. The same was true during his three-year stint at Yale before he transferred into the
ACC. Altogether, Hawes caught 51 passes for 566 yards with six touchdowns (none with the Yellow Jackets) across four seasons in college.
His coaching staffs at Yale and Georgia Tech understood early how Hawes could bring the most value to his respective teams — and that was as a dominant blocker.
Just how valuable was Hawes during his rookie campaign with the Bills?
He played on 43% of the team’s offensive snaps in 2025, the highest rate for a rookie picked in Round 3 or later in Buffalo since Gabe Davis appeared on 73.2% of the team’s offensive snaps in 2020.
On those snaps, he blocked for the run 240 times, and while James Cook wasn’t running directly behind Hawes on all of those snaps, these are the cumulative statistics for the 2025 rushing champ when Hawes had a run-blocking role on the play, per SumerSports:
- 240 rushing attempts
- 1,351 yards
- 5.63 yards per carry
- 11 rushing touchdowns
That 1,351 yards represented 83.3% of Cook’s regular season rush-yard total.
The Bills trusted Hawes quickly — just ask Josh Allen about that dot of a fourth-quarter throw to Hawes inside the 1-yard line during the comeback against the Ravens in Week 1 — and he regularly delivered. Sure, his role was niche, yet for a team that led the league in rushing attempts (by a wide margin) with 547 during the regular season, Hawes’ speciality was undoubtedly needed.
Then there’s this comment from the original Feed Post, which brings me to a suggestion
I feel there’s more Hawes can contribute as a receiver in Year 2 and beyond.
Sample-size considerations must be made here — yet I can’t ignore how efficient Hawes was when thrown the football as a rookie, though he was sparingly utilized.
Hawes ran just 102 pass routes in 2025. He registered 187 receiving yards, which equates to a 1.83 yards-per-route run figure. Is that good?
It was the highest among all rookie tight ends who ran at least 75 pass routes in 2025. Back to sample-size considerations for a second — Colston Loveland and Oronde Gasdsen nearly ran four times the amount of routes as Hawes, and Harold Fannin ran more than four times as many. Those rookie tight ends rounded out the Top 4 in YPRR among rookie tight ends in 2025.
The point remains — Hawes flashed enough receiving efficiency as a rookie while being thrust into a blocking specialist role that I can confidently write he earned more than the 19 targets he saw in his first season in Buffalo.
Then again, just a few weeks ago, I wrote this on Hawes in my projection of how the Bills targets would be dispersed in 2026:
20 – Miscellaneous targets to Ray Davis and Jackson Hawes – (mostly to the latter — I was keen on a Hawes mini breakout as a receiver, then Reggie Gilliam left in free agency.)
The last few words in that projection are key — based on how the Joe Brady offense has operated the past 2.5 seasons, the Gilliam departure does hint at a stronger likelihood Hawes becomes more of a fullback/H-back than a hybrid blocker/receiver, but the truth is we don’t know how different Brady’s offense will be now that he’s head coach.
If my projected 510 regular-season pass attempts for Allen is drastically too low, that conceivably could lead to more looks as a pass-catcher for Hawes in his second season in Buffalo.
But, heck — even if Hawes remains an incidental element of the Bills aerial attack, there’s every reason to believe he’ll still provide major blocking value. And now, after a year to add more beef to his frame and sculpt muscle within the team’s strength and conditioning program, it’s sensible to assume Hawes improves as a blocker. That would be an equally marvelous development for the Bills as it would be frightening for opposing defensive ends, linebackers, and safeties.
