Ricky Pearsall 2026 Season Preview — what repeats, what doesn't | Muffed

Ricky Pearsall gained five hundred twenty-eight receiving yards last season and never once scored. Only one player in football had more scoreless yards. The market's response: receiver forty-eight at pick one-oh-nine — and a locker room that just added Mike Evans and Christian Kirk to the room he was supposed to inherit.

The season: nine games — a hamstring cost him the middle of the year, and a suspected minor PCL sprain, per CBS Sports, shaded the end of it — with thirty-six catches on fifty-three targets for those five hundred twenty-eight yards and zero touchdowns. Seven-point-eight Half-PPR points a game, forty-sixth among receivers who played half the season. In his nine games he drew eighteen-point-four percent of San Francisco's targets — a real starter's share on a twelve-and-five wild-card team. And he earned it efficiently: ten yards per target, which is exactly what makes the zero in the touchdown column so strange.

Two years in, the per-game line is quietly fine: seven-one as a rookie, seven-eight in year two, both in seasons the injury report kept interrupting. The rookie year was eleven games; year two was nine; the market has never seen twelve months of him. Durability, not talent, is the missing line on the résumé.

The pattern read: touchdowns are the least repeatable stat we track — year over year they replicate at point-five-two across nine hundred fifty-four receiver seasons, far below targets at point-seven-nine. That cuts both ways, and we'll say both: a zero-touchdown season on five hundred twenty-eight yards is the kind of outlier that usually corrects, and nothing in the data promises the correction. We price what repeats, and what repeats is his target share — if the room lets it. Target volume is the sticky stat — point-seven-nine year over year — and eighteen percent of a Shanahan passing game is a real baseline to regress from.

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About that room. San Francisco lost Jauan Jennings to Minnesota in early May, per NFL.com, and Brandon Aiyuk — who hasn't played since October twenty-twenty-four — sits on the reserve list with a release widely expected, per ESPN and Pro Football Rumors. The replacements are not modest: Mike Evans signed from Tampa in March, per ESPN; Christian Kirk arrived in free agency; and the front office spent the first pick of round two on receiver De'Zhaun Stribling in April, per team draft coverage. Kittle's Achilles rehab could tilt early-season targets toward the receivers — or Purdy, healthy again per NBC Sports Bay Area, simply spreads it thinner. Shanahan and Kubiak return. The June beat coverage adds one more name to watch — Jacob Cowing drew offseason-program buzz, per ESPN's Nick Wagoner.

The price: WR48 at pick one-oh-nine, for the per-game WR46. The market has him exactly where the scoreboard put him. WR48 assumes a flex-week rotation piece — roughly what an eighteen-percent share delivers when the touchdown luck is average instead of absent. [pause] Our verdict: no call. The price and the production match, and the two big unknowns — touchdown correction up, target squeeze down — pull in opposite directions with no pattern to break the tie. The caveat out loud: if Evans and Kirk take the volume, there's nothing left to regress; if the share holds, the touchdowns almost have to show up.

Watch his first-team snaps in the preseason — outside or slot, with Evans on the field — and his red-zone targets in September. Red-zone volume is the leading indicator of a touchdown correction — the yardage already proved he gets open. [[CLOSE]] He's one of your guys? Every player on your roster gets this treatment — every week, all season.