Chris Olave 2026 Season Preview — a hundred catches at a WR11 price | Muffed

Chris Olave caught a hundred passes last season and finished as the number eight receiver per game — and he's the eleventh receiver off the board. A hundred-catch alpha at a discount, with one honest asterisk: he plays for a rebuilding team with a young quarterback. The Muffed 2026 preview.

The season was a career year on a bad team: a hundred catches on a hundred fifty-six targets for eleven sixty-three and nine touchdowns, on the league's twenty-seventh-ranked offense at six-and-eleven. Sixteen-eight a game, WR8 per game, on a twenty-nine percent target share and forty-one percent of the air yards — and notably, he played all sixteen games he suited up for after an injury-shortened 2024. The signature was a sixty-two-yard touchdown at Carolina, the most valuable play of his year. A chain-mover and a deep threat at once.

The arc reads like a bounce: thirteen-two, fourteen-five, then an injury-wrecked eight-game 2024, and now the WR8 career year. The talent was never the question — availability was, and he just answered it with a full, productive season.

What repeats: a hundred-fifty-six targets is elite, sticky volume — the foundation of his floor. His touchdown share, at twenty percent, sits right at the fade boundary but not over it, so no pattern fires. The profile is a high-volume alpha who finally stayed healthy. There's nothing in the data arguing his price is too high.

[[SITUATION]]

The situation is the asterisk, per the reports: New Orleans is building around young quarterback Tyler Shough under coordinator Kellen Moore, and the Olave-Shough connection is already the focal point of the offense. A second-year leap from the quarterback is upside; a rebuilding team's growing pains are the risk. The Saints also added pass-catchers, which could nibble at that twenty-nine percent share — though a hundred-fifty-six-target alpha doesn't usually cede much.

The price: pick twenty-seven and a half, the eleventh receiver. Verdict: LEAN — underpriced. He finished WR8 on volume that repeats, and he's priced WR11; the discount is the market charging for the team context and his injury history. Both are fair charges, but they over-discount a hundred-catch alpha. The counter: if Shough struggles or the new weapons split the targets, WR11 is merely fair — the floor is real, the ceiling depends on a quarterback we can't project.

September watch: the target share with the new weapons in the room, and Shough's development — Olave's ceiling rises or falls with the quarterback. Your guys, every week. Next preview's queued.