Pat Freiermuth

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.

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. 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. He's one of your guys? This show covers your whole roster — every player, every week, all season.