Deebo Samuel Sr. 2026 Season Preview — what repeats, what doesn't | Muffed

Deebo Samuel caught seventy-two passes last season, led Washington in every receiving category that exists, and as of July second does not have a team. Receiver sixty-four, pick one-seventy-four, is not a grade on the player — it's a grade on his phone. This is the second episode we've had to build this way, and the method is the same: price the tape first, then price the silence.

The season, before the circumstances swallow it: sixteen games for Washington, seventy-two catches on ninety-nine targets — a seventy-three percent catch rate — for seven hundred twenty-seven yards, plus seventeen carries for seventy-five, and six touchdowns: five through the air, one on the ground. Nine-point-five Half-PPR points a game, thirty-third among receivers per game, twenty-eighth in total. He drew a quarter of Washington's targets in his games — twenty-four-point-seven percent, the heaviest share in this entire batch — on a five-and-twelve team whose season broke when Jayden Daniels' elbow gave out in November. Led the team in catches, in yards, and in targets, every position counted.

The career note the market is really pricing: ten-point-one yards a catch, the lowest of his seven seasons — a career built on turning short touches into long gains, now producing short touches. The per-game arc bounced up from twenty-twenty-four — eight-seven to nine-five — but the eighteen-eight peak of the twenty-twenty-one all-purpose season is five years back.

The pattern beat: his touchdown share, point-one-nine, sits inside the top-forty-eight cohort but under the fade line — no fire, nothing to give back. Our library has no receiver aging cliff — the validated aging pattern is running backs only, and we don't borrow across positions. And the stickiest stat we have, targets per game at point-seven-nine, needs a depth chart to replicate onto. There isn't one. Same conclusion as the last free agent we priced: no pattern conditions on July unemployment.

[[SITUATION]]

The circumstances, dated. His Washington deal — the one-year rework after the March twenty-twenty-five trade from San Francisco — expired through void years around March second, per PFT; he wasn't released, and he wasn't re-signed, leaving about twelve million in dead cap behind. Four months later the market is think pieces: ESPN's May best-fits piece named the Colts; ESPN's Stephen Holder had Indianapolis still mulling him in mid-June; Ravens, Raiders, and Seahawks framings circulated all June — and no visit has been concretely reported anywhere. The going theories, per FOX Sports' late-June survey: he turned thirty this year, the asking price started near Spotrac's fifteen-million valuation while the realistic offer sits near eight, and the shelf is crowded — Stefon Diggs and Keenan Allen are unsigned too. The heel he managed through twenty-twenty-five was never surgical news, and no injury has been reported since.

The price: WR64 at pick one-seventy-four for last season's total WR28 — a two-tier-plus discount for a roster spot that doesn't exist. [pause] Our verdict: watchlist. We can't underwrite a target share on a team that hasn't signed him — that's not caution, that's arithmetic — and we won't pretend a twenty-five percent target share evaporated because a front office hasn't called yet. The caveat is the whole file: the day he signs somewhere real, this price is two tiers wrong in whichever direction the depth chart says — and if camp opens with him unsigned, WR64 was a donation.

Watch the wire, and watch it with a calendar: veteran receivers historically sign when a contender's camp gets its first bad hamstring news. Until then he is the heaviest verified target share on this board attached to a usage projection of zero. [[CLOSE]] If he's one of your guys, this show exists for your whole roster — every player, every week, all season.