Gunnar Helm Camp Update — August 31: Kept in a Four-Deep Tight End Room

Gunnar Helm is on the initial 53, in a tight end room the Titans kept four deep: Daniel Bellinger, Helm, David Martin-Robinson and Kylen Granson, per Jim Wyatt's position-by-position roster breakdown at the team's website. His job was not in question and the cutdown didn't question it. What the cutdown also didn't do is separate him from Bellinger — both are on the roster, and nothing in the week's reporting ranks them.

The week's record on Helm himself is thin in a specific way. He started at tight end in the August 20-third win over Seattle, per the club's postgame notes, which carry no receiving line for him — an unlisted stat, not a published zero — on a night Cam Ward's 12 attempts produced recorded catches to Tyjae Spears, Wan'Dale Robinson and Tony Pollard. Thursday's joint-practice observations from Wyatt don't record him either, and he did not play the finale, where most of the starters sat. So the question our August 20-third episode asked — Helm's targets in the starters' stint — has no answer: targets went unpublished for everyone. For a player whose entire case is target volume, the last week of camp produced zero target evidence in either column, practice or game. That's not a bad sign; it's no sign, and we'd rather say so than invent one.

Back in June we previewed Helm on the stickiest number we track — tight end targets per game — and said his 80 percent catch rate was believable while growth from three-and-a-half targets a game would be expensive. August ended with that argument exactly where June left it, +1 structural fact: the roster kept Bellinger too, per Wyatt, so the two-catcher split that argument assumed is still the shape of the room. We'll check in again as the season arrives.

_Data via nflverse._