Antonio Gates will again be a difficult guy to project next year. Is he old? By football standards, maybe. He’ll turn 33 next month. But Jason Witten isn’t too far behind, as he just celebrated his 31st birthday, and the everlasting Tony Gonzalez is 37. Both of those guys were pretty good last year, combining for 1,969 receiving yards.
Merely saying Gates is old becomes an exercise of reaching for the lowest possible branch on the fantasy football tree o’ scare tactics. The reasons for his plummeting stock over the past few years go beyond that.
