Mark Andrews 2026 Season Preview — what repeats, what doesn't | Muffed

Mark Andrews just posted the fewest receiving yards of his career — any season, rookie year included — and drafts still pay tight end fifteen for the name on the jersey. The trend under the name is four years long and points one direction.

The season: all seventeen games, forty-eight catches on seventy targets, four hundred twenty-two yards, six touchdowns — six-point-three Half-PPR points a game, twenty-sixth among tight ends per game, sixteenth in total. Baltimore went eight and nine and missed the playoffs, and the offense that once ran through him ran around him: four-point-one targets a game, against a career peak of nine. He caught sixty-nine percent of what he was thrown, and Baltimore's eight and nine put it outside the field for the first time since twenty-twenty-one.

The career arc reads like a staircase down: fourteen-six points a game at the twenty-twenty-one peak, then ten-three, eleven-three, nine-five, six-three. Three straight per-game declines, each steeper. For scale, the peak was a hundred seven catches on a hundred fifty-three targets in twenty-twenty-one — the volume that made him a first-round fantasy pick once upon a time. As recently as twenty-twenty-three he drew six targets a game.

Here's the uncomfortable pattern read. For tight ends, targets are the stat that repeats — point-eight correlation year over year across two hundred thirty-eight player-seasons — and that stickiness is exactly the problem, because his targets are the thing that collapsed. The correlation held at point-seven-two in the decade's first half, across two hundred fifty-one seasons — this is not a recency artifact. The library says next year's volume looks like last year's, and last year's was four a game. Meanwhile six touchdowns on forty-eight catches means better than a quarter of his production came from the least repeatable stat we track. Declining volume held up by touchdown rate is the profile our patterns trust least.

[[SITUATION]]

The situation, and the honest counterweights. Baltimore extended him December fourth — three years, thirty-nine and a quarter million, roughly twenty-six guaranteed per Spotrac — which is a team saying out loud it disagrees with the trend line. Then it cleared the room: Isaiah Likely left for the Giants in March, and the Ravens added veteran Durham Smythe and traded up in round four for SMU's Matt Hibner, per the team site. The team site itself envisions a Likely-type role for the rookie — so the room cleared and then partially re-filled. Everything else is new: John Harbaugh's eighteen-year era ended in January — he's coaching the Giants now — and Baltimore hired Jesse Minter as head coach with Declan Doyle, twenty-nine, the league's youngest play-caller, running the offense, per the team site and NFL.com. Lamar Jackson opened June minicamp by hitting Andrews three times in the first team period, per the Baltimore Banner.

The price: TE15 at pick one-nineteen pays for a bounce back toward the old Andrews. That slot assumes starter-adjacent production, and the four-target version of him isn't that. [pause] Our verdict: lean, overpriced. History leans because volume follows volume, and his has fallen three straight years. The caveat, spoken: the extension and the emptied depth chart are real conviction — if a new offense simply throws him six targets a game again, TE15 will look silly. We price the four he actually got.

Watch September targets against that four-a-game baseline, and his red-zone share in an offense with no other proven tight end. First-month target share settles whether the December extension was a plan or a courtesy. [[CLOSE]] If he's one of your guys, this show exists for your whole roster — every player, every week, all season.