Gunnar Helm

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• 2026 PreviewJul 3, 2026

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

  Helm played all 16 games as Tennessee's incumbent tight end and finished TE33, averaging 4.4 half-PPR points per game. That production rested more on consistent role and opportunity than on efficient or touchdown-heavy play, making the durability and usage the parts of 2025 worth tracking.

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  Show notes & transcript

  The market is paying pick one-80 for a promotion that hasn't happened yet. Gunnar Helm, tight end 25, produced tight-end-33 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: 16 games, 44 catches on 55 targets — an 80 percent catch rate, clean as they come — for 357 yards and two touchdowns. 4.4 Half-PPR points a game, 30-ninth among tight ends per game, 30-third in total. 3.4 targets a game, 11 percent of Tennessee's tree in his games, on a three-and-14 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 20-21 and point-eight-oh since, across 251 238 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 3.4 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.

  The situation is why the beat believes anyway. Chig Okonkwo took his 79 targets and his team-leading 560 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 15 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-80. That slot paid 6.3 points a game last season; he produced 4.4. The market is fronting him nearly two points of growth on faith and depth-chart logic. 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 3.4 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. If he's one of your guys, this show exists for your whole roster — every player, every week, all season.