Green Bay Packers tight end Tucker Kraft is quickly becoming a superstar. In the pantheon of elite NFL tight ends in 2025, there’s a strong case that Kraft belongs to be mentioned amongst the very best of the best.

That’s an elite group that includes veterans like Travis Kelce, George Kittle, Dallas Goedert and Mark Andrews but there are also several youngsters who are quickly becoming stars. Names to know include Trey McBride, Brock Bowers and Sam LaPorta.

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After Sunday night’s performance against the Pittsburgh Steelers, though, there’s reason to believe that Kraft could find himself on top of this list of elite tight ends when all is done in 2025.

It was a career-night for the third-round pick out of South Dakota State. He caught 7-of-9 targets for 143 yards and two touchdowns. He averaged 20.4 yards per catch and was an absolute menace after the catch. In fact, out of his 143 yards, 131 came after the catch.

Kraft is a YAC machine, and the numbers back that up.

So far on the season, he’s caught 30 passes for 469 yards and six touchdowns. As far as YAC is concerned, 336 of those yards have come after the catch. That’s by far and away the leading YAC number amongst all NFL tight ends (the next closest is Tyler Warren at 293 YAC yards) and those numbers are also elite amongst all NFL players in general.

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Only Christian McCaffrey, Bijan Robinson and Ja’Marr Chase have more YAC yards than Kraft on the season.

Ultimately it’s a mindset for the star tight end.

“Anytime I get the ball in my hands, all I’m thinking about is north-south,” Kraft said after the win over Pittsburgh, according to Brandon Carwile of PackersWire. “How can I squeeze every amount of yards out of this play? Those opportunities came to me today, and I just executed.”

Kraft has tremendous athletic ability, but he also checks in at 6-foot-5, 259 pounds. When he gets a head of steam going he’s extremely hard to take down. Throw in the fact that he’s out there searching for contact and putting all of his effort into getting extra yards, and you end up with moments like this catch and run against the Steelers:

Amongst all NFL tight ends, Kraft is third in receiving yards, 2nd in yards per catch, 2nd in receiving touchdowns, 1st in catches of 40-plus yards and 1st in pass rating when targeted.

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Those are elite numbers from an elite tight end. “Kraft YAC and Cheese” has put himself on the map.