Gunnar Helm Camp Update — August 16: One Catch, No Noise, Job Still His
2026 NFL Season · Monday, Aug 17
Helm caught one pass from Cam Ward during the starters' stint in the preseason opener and otherwise stayed out of the week's coverage entirely. The June question was never the job; it was the target count, and that gets answered in September.
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Quiet week for Gunnar Helm, and quiet weeks in August tend to belong to players whose jobs are not in question. His one appearance in the record: a catch from Cam Ward during the starters' roughly 20 offensive plays in Thursday's 19 to 13 win at the 49ers, per Easton Freeze's charting at A to Z Sports. He drew no individual practice notes in the accessed coverage all week; the last real Helm storyline was the pre-camp one, the low Pro Football Focus ranking that the beat treated as bulletin-board material for his second season.
For most listeners, the June case is worth restating, because it is a clean one. Helm caught 44 of 55 targets as a rookie, an 80 percent catch rate, but on thin volume: 3.4 targets a game, 11 percent of Tennessee's tree. Our preview leaned on the stickiest number in our library, tight end targets per game, which repeats year over year better than any other stat we track. That stickiness cuts both ways for Helm. It makes his floor believable, and it makes growth expensive, because next year's targets usually look like last year's. The situation argues for growth anyway: Chig Okonkwo took his 79 targets to Washington, the club replaced him with depth rather than a rival, and Brian Daboll has a long record of feeding tight ends who earn it. We said the September target count against that 3.4 baseline would decide everything, and that there is no second-year tight end leap in our library to lean on in the meantime.
One catch on a 20-play starter stint is perfectly consistent with either future. He was on the field with the first offense, which keeps the role half of the case intact, and a preseason opener where Ward completed five passes total was never going to reveal a target tree.
Does the June read hold? UNCHANGED — the job looks like his and the volume question cannot be answered by a week like this one. Next week we watch his usage in the Seahawks joint practice and game, and any sign of where Ward's checkdowns go when the play breaks down, because that is where a tight end's target growth shows up first. We'll check next Sunday.
_Data via nflverse._
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