Somewhere along the way during his 11-year career, Matthew Stafford developed a reputation of avoiding tight ends. The primary source of this misconception was likely the Eric Ebron era. For a top-10 pick, expectations were extremely high for Ebron. However, in his four years in Detroit, he only finished in the top three in team targets once.
But this hasn’t always been the case for Stafford. Early in his career, Brandon Pettigrew was one of his favorite targets. In fact, there was a three-year stretch in which Stafford targeted Pettigrew over 100 times a season (Ebron’s career high in Detroit was 86), second only to Calvin Johnson in those years.