Pat Freiermuth 2026 Season Preview — what repeats, what doesn't | Muffed

Five seasons into his career, Pat Freiermuth's per-game scoring has never left a three-point band — the floor is five and a half, the ceiling is eight-point-one, and last year landed at six-point-two, right in the middle. The market prices him at tight end thirty, pick one-ninety-four: the very bottom of the band. That's the whole episode — a player whose range is known, priced at its floor, in an offense that just got rebuilt by a play-caller famous for feeding tight ends.

The season: fifteen games, forty-one catches on fifty-four targets — a seventy-six percent catch rate — for four hundred eighty-six yards and four touchdowns. Six-point-two Half-PPR points a game, twenty-seventh among tight ends per game, twenty-fourth in total. Eleven percent of Pittsburgh's targets in his games, in a room where Jonnu Smith's fifty-four targets and Darnell Washington's blocking split the position three ways. A division winner at ten-and-seven; a wild-card exit, thirty to six, to Houston.

The career is the band: seven-six and seven-eight a game in years one and two, the injury-shortened five-five, the eight-one peak in twenty-twenty-four — sixty-five catches, seven scores — then last year's six-two. Five years, one identity: he catches what he's thrown at a mid-TE1 rate whenever the targets arrive, and the targets have never stayed.

The pattern beat: targets are identity at this position — point-seven-two and point-eight-oh across the eras, n of two hundred fifty-one and two hundred thirty-eight — and his three-point-six a game is the baseline stickiness defends. The band itself is the argument: no touchdown inflation anywhere in it, no outlier season begging to regress, just a range. When a player's whole history is a band and the price sits under the band's floor, the market is predicting something the file doesn't contain.

[[SITUATION]]

What the market is predicting is the room, so here's the room, dated. Jonnu Smith was released in early March — fifty-four targets, unassigned. Darnell Washington got extended this offseason on starter money, per the reporting, and the beat expects his snaps to stay heavy. Robert Tonyan — who knows this scheme from Green Bay — signed as minicamp ended. The scheme is the headline: Mike McCarthy calls the plays now, and his offenses have a long, documented history of short-to-intermediate tight-end volume, per the previews. The Post-Gazette's beat writer said it plainly on Pittsburgh radio in early July: he expects Freiermuth to get a bigger share of the snaps this year — but it's going to be close, and both tight ends will play a lot. Add the quarterback: Aaron Rodgers, back for a farewell season, connected with Freiermuth in the June OTA passing periods, per the beat. Signed through twenty-twenty-eight; the club restructured him in May.

The price: TE30 at pick one-ninety-four. The slot paid five-point-eight last season; his career floor is five-and-a-half, his last season six-two. [pause] Our verdict: no call. The price sits at the bottom of the band and the band is real — but a three-way tight-end room run by a coach who also loves the other guy's blocking is exactly the kind of situation that keeps a band player at the bottom of his band, and we can't call a four-tenths gap a mistake. The caveat, warmly: Jonnu's fifty-four vacated targets, a tight-end-friendly play-caller, and a Hall of Fame quarterback's trust are all sitting there un-priced. If the snap share tips his way in September, TE30 becomes the cheapest TE1 path on the board.

Watch the snap split with Washington — the beat says close, and close is the whole verdict — plus the twelve-personnel rate under McCarthy and the red-zone pecking order. The band never moved in five years; the situation finally might. [[CLOSE]] He's one of your guys? This show covers your whole roster — every player, every week, all season.