Bijan Robinson 2026 Season Preview — the touchdowns owe him money | Muffed

Here's a sentence you've never heard about a number-two overall pick: the touchdowns owe HIM money. Bijan Robinson just finished as the RB3 in fantasy — nineteen point five a game — while scoring eleven times on three hundred sixty-six touches. That's not a red flag. That's a rebate pending. The Muffed 2026 preview, in three acts.

Act one, the season. On an Atlanta offense that ranked twenty-fourth in expected points added — bottom third of football — Robinson was the entire show: two eighty-seven carries for fourteen seventy-eight at five-two, plus two hundred fifty-seven yards over expected, third-most in the league. Then the part that separates him: seventy-nine catches for eight hundred twenty yards on a twenty percent target share. The signature play was Week 17 against the Rams — first-and-ten from his own seven, right tackle, ninety-three yards to the house. Longest run of his season, nearly seven expected points on one snap, against the second-best offense in football's home crowd. He cleared fourteen points in thirteen of seventeen games. Steady floor, real ceiling, broken surroundings.

Act two, the arc. Twelve-eight a game as a rookie. Eighteen-three in year two. Nineteen-five in year three — RB17 to RB4 to RB3, with the workload climbing to three sixty-six touches. Year-three backs with ascending volume and ascending efficiency are what the first round is for.

Act three, what repeats — and this is where his profile is quietly the safest in the top five. The two stickiest things a back can own: volume and receiving work. He has both, trending up. The thing that doesn't repeat — touchdown luck — is currently running against him: a seventeen-point-eight percent touchdown share, near the bottom for an elite back, seven rushing scores on two hundred eighty-seven carries behind below-average quarterback play. Backs in the low-touchdown quartile barely fade at all — and the flip side of our touchdown rule is that starved scorers on elite volume tend to get fed eventually. We won't promise regression-to-the-mean money. We'll just note the direction the mean is.

[[SITUATION]]

The situation: it's loud, and we can't model any of it. Atlanta has a new head coach — Kevin Stefanski — Kirk Cousins is gone, and the quarterback room is an open competition: Michael Penix rehabbing the knee he tore in November, with the June practice reports putting his return window anywhere from camp to mid-season, and Tua Tagovailoa signed after his Miami release to compete, with Stefanski publicly splitting the reps. Quarterback chaos, again — except Robinson just proved he produces RB3 numbers through exactly that. One more reported wrinkle: Schefter says an extension is expected this offseason — money news, not usage news. The honest read: a functional offense raises his touchdown count; more chaos keeps him at... RB3, apparently.

The price: one-seven, the second pick. [pause] Verdict: NO CALL. He's priced second among backs and he finished a hair behind that, third — the market got it right, and unlike most number-two picks, his downside case already happened last year and it scored nineteen-five a game. The counter, said straight: a back who needs positive touchdown variance to beat his draft slot has less surplus upside than the lightning being drafted one spot ahead, and the QB room is genuinely murky.

Watch in September: the goal-line work — if the new staff feeds him inside the five, the rebate arrives early. And the target share — twenty percent is elite for a back; under a new coach it's the first thing to check. [[CLOSE]] Your whole roster gets this treatment every week — that's the show.