Isaiah Likely 2026 Season Preview — what repeats, what doesn't | Muffed

The Giants gave Isaiah Likely forty million dollars for a job he's never actually held, and drafts are charging tight end eleven for the same bet. His career high is forty-two catches.

The season he's selling off: twelve games, twenty-seven catches on thirty-six targets, three hundred seven yards, one touchdown — four-point-oh Half-PPR points a game, forty-second among tight ends who played half the season. A broken bone in his foot needed surgery in late July, per NFL.com, cost him the start of the year, and the offense never came back to him: twelve percent of Baltimore's targets in the games he played, on a team that fell to eight and nine. He caught seventy-five percent of a very small pie — the hands were never the issue; the opportunity was.

The career, plainly: four seasons, never more than forty-two catches, per-game marks of five-two, six-one, six-eight, and four-oh. The twenty-twenty-four version — six-point-eight a game in a part-time role — is the one the contract paid for. That year was forty-two catches for four hundred seventy-seven yards and six scores — a real flex season, and still a part-time job.

Here's the pattern problem. For tight ends, targets are identity: year over year, targets per game replicate at nearly point-eight in the current era, across two hundred thirty-eight player-seasons. It held at point-seven-two across two hundred fifty-one seasons in the early half of the decade too — not a recency artifact. Likely's identity, four years running, is three-to-four targets a game — never more, usually less. The price asks that number to roughly double. Our library contains exactly zero patterns that license projecting a doubling — and one very sticky one that says next year's volume looks like last year's.

[[SITUATION]]

Now the honest other side, because the situation really is different. New York signed him in March — three years, forty million, twenty and a half guaranteed, per the team site — to reunite with John Harbaugh, hired as Giants head coach in January, the man whose Ravens drafted him in twenty-twenty-two. Matt Nagy calls the offense. Malik Nabers had a second procedure on the same knee in May — scar tissue and meniscus, camp status uncertain, Week One the hope, per Schefter and SNY — which is why ESPN's Giants beat has floated Likely as a candidate to lead the team in receiving, per Jordan Raanan in June. The competition is real too: Theo Johnson was one of Jaxson Dart's most-targeted players all spring, per Empire Sports Media, and the staff talks about them as a pair. One more verified fact about the landing spot: New York went four and thirteen, so the volume is there to be claimed if the offense functions at all.

The price: TE11 at pick one-oh-six pays for a top-twelve tight end season. He has never finished inside the top twenty-five per game. TE11 in a twelve-team room is a starter's slot — the price assumes a season that has never existed at his usage. [pause] Our verdict: lean, overpriced. History leans rather than shouts because the vacuum is real — a hurt WR1, a tight-end-friendly young quarterback, a head coach who has now invested in him twice. If the targets double, the lean is wrong. We're just not in the business of paying week-three prices in July for volume that has never existed.

Watch September targets per game — five or more means a new identity, three means the old one — and Nabers' practice designation when camp opens. A month of five-target games would be the first sustained starter usage of his career — the whole thesis, visible by October. [[CLOSE]] He's one of your guys? Every player on your roster gets this treatment — every week, all season.