The NFL tight end with the most touchdowns is Antonio Gates.
That’s good enough for me, on balance.
The former San Diego Chargers All-Pro deserves induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s Class of 2025 that will be announced Thursday night in New Orleans as part of Super Bowl 59 festivities.
Touchdowns being rather important in NFL games, Gates is worthy of election.
But there is a catch.
Voters must take into the four-game suspension Gates served late in his career for having a banned performance-enhancing substance in his system. That slip-up may have led some voters to exempt Gates last year on his first ballot.
On football performance alone, it’s not a very tough evaluation.
Chargers opponents built their red-zone defenses around stopping Gates. He defeated them nonetheless, year after year.
He had 116 catches for touchdowns, trailing only six wide receivers — all of them Hall of Famers.
Remarkably, Gates caught more TD es than Hall of Fame tight end Tony Gonzalez, who was elected six years ago, despite playing in 34 fewer games.
Gates had eight seasons with at least eight receiving touchdowns, the most for a tight end.
He thrived in red-zone traffic, despite lacking great size and seldom outjumping opponents.
Like current Chiefs All-Pro tight end Travis Kelce, who Sunday will play in his fifth Super Bowl, Gates had a feel for how to recognize and defeat man or zone defenses. The former Kent State basketball star fooled defenders with his quickness and agility, and used his broad shoulders, large base and rare body control to make contested catches.
“No matter where the defender is,” Patriots coach Bill Belichick told San Diego media before Gates’ final game six years ago, “there’s a place where you can put the football where he can get it and the defender can’t.”
“He’s never covered, really,” Belichick said.
Teammates said even the sound of the soft-handed Gates catching the ball was superior.
It’d be silly to blame Gates for not reaching a Super Bowl, a deficit shared by Gonzalez and other Hall of Fame tight ends such as Ozzie Newsome and Kellen Winslow, the sport-changing star of the Chargers’ “Air Coryell” offenses.
The best case for a voter to exempt Gates centers on his four-game suspension for violating the NFL’s policy against banned performance-enhancing substances in 2015. Gates declined to identify the substance that caused his failed drug test, but said he was red-flagged for a high testosterone level. He said he didn’t knowingly take a banned substance and blamed himself for not being more careful about his supplement usage.
Shannon Sharpe cut him no slack.
A Hall of Fame tight end who’d been inducted four years earlier, the former Denver Broncos star and three-time Super Bowl champion, reacting to the news that summer, said the suspension “calls into question everything” Gates had accomplished. Sharpe said Gates “cheated himself, and he cheated the game.”
Gates was 35, entering his 13th season, when he was suspended. He should’ve known how to keep banned substances out of his body by then. Over the previous decade-plus, he’d never flunked any of the numerous NFL drug tests.
Gates said that in the six years leading up to his suspension, he also was subjected to frequent random testing due to being late for tests early in his career.
In his return from the suspension, which cost him $350,000, Gates scorched the Steelers for nine catches and two touchdowns. He sat out just one more game that year.
Gates failed no more drug tests in his career, despite increased testing following the suspension.
The creaky football elder — still shrewd, agile and consistent — played three more full seasons.
In 2016 with the final San Diego Chargers team, Gates held off second-round draftee Hunter Henry from supplanting him as the exclusive starter and finished with seven TD receptions, trailing only Henry for team honors.
At 37, he played in every game for the now-L.A. Chargers.
At 38, when the Chargers brought him back after Henry suffered a preseason knee-ligament injury, Old Man Gates missed no games and helped the franchise achieve its third-highest win total and an upset victory in the wild-card round.
In his 18th game for that team — his career finale — Gates caught a TD in the road playoff loss against Belichick’s defense.
He finished with 11,841 receiving yards, third all-time for a tight end.
Alert the bronze sculptor. Fit Gates for a jacket.
