Gunnar Helm 2026 Season Preview — what repeats, what doesn't | Muffed

The market is paying pick one-eighty for a promotion that hasn't happened yet. Gunnar Helm, tight end twenty-five, produced tight-end-thirty-three numbers as a rookie — and the two-point gap between that price and that production is the size of the bet Tennessee's beat writers are making on his second year.

The season: sixteen games, forty-four catches on fifty-five targets — an eighty percent catch rate, clean as they come — for three hundred fifty-seven yards and two touchdowns. Four-point-four Half-PPR points a game, thirty-ninth among tight ends per game, thirty-third in total. Three-point-four targets a game, eleven percent of Tennessee's tree in his games, on a three-and-fourteen team. Even in the thin rookie role he finished fourth on the roster in both catches and targets — and of the trio ahead of him in targets, Ayomanor, Okonkwo, and Dike, only Okonkwo left. For a fourth-round rookie thrown into a full season, the floor was real; the ceiling never had to show up.

The career arc is one data point, so we'll say only what it says: he caught what they threw him, and they didn't throw him much.

The pattern beat cuts precisely here. Tight end targets per game is the stickiest stat our library carries — replication at point-seven-two before twenty-twenty-one and point-eight-oh since, across two hundred fifty-one and two hundred thirty-eight seasons. Stickiness is a two-way street: it's why his floor is believable, and it's why the projection is expensive — next year's targets usually look like last year's, and last year's were three-point-four a game. There is no year-two tight end leap cohort in our library. We've never validated one, and a price can't make us invent one.

[[SITUATION]]

The situation is why the beat believes anyway. Chig Okonkwo took his seventy-nine targets and his team-leading five hundred sixty receiving yards to Washington in March, and the club's answer at the position was Helm plus depth: Daniel Bellinger on day one of free agency, Kylen Granson on a one-year deal, a seventh-round rookie behind them. SI's Titans coverage ranks Helm inside its top fifteen players on the roster and frames the job as his; the June reports out of OTAs had him in great shape and catching everything again. The offense is Brian Daboll's now — a coordinator with a long record of feeding tight ends when they earn it — attached to year two of Cam Ward, who reported lighter and drew warm minicamp reviews, per the beat. The counterweight: Tennessee also spent the fourth pick on Carnell Tate and signed Wan'Dale Robinson, so the tree added two new mouths at once.

The price: TE25 at pick one-eighty. That slot paid six-point-three points a game last season; he produced four-point-four. The market is fronting him nearly two points of growth on faith and depth-chart logic. [pause] Our verdict: watchlist. We can't underwrite a leap our library has never seen — and we won't fade the only incumbent tight end in a Daboll offense at a price this thin either. The caveat runs both directions, so hear both: if the targets climb toward five a game, TE25 was free money and this episode aged badly by October — and if stickiness does what stickiness does, he's a TE33 rerun with a nicer depth chart.

Watch his September targets against the three-point-four baseline — that number decides everything — plus the Bellinger snap split in camp and where Ward's checkdowns actually go. The role is his to keep; the volume is his to prove. [[CLOSE]] If he's one of your guys, this show exists for your whole roster — every player, every week, all season.