Rashid Shaheed — Week 1: Three Targets, Eighty Return Yards
2026 NFL Season · Half-PPR Scoring · Thursday, Sep 10
Shaheed was thrown to three times on Seattle's twenty-four throws in the opener and caught one for four yards. The bigger workload was on special teams: three kickoff returns for twenty-two, twenty-eight and thirty yards, a nine-yard punt return, and three fair catches. The target-share question the preview asked got its first answer, and the answer was three.
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Rashid Shaheed's first target as a Seahawk was Sam Darnold's second throw of the season, second and six at the New England 46, incomplete short right. On the next snap Darnold was hurt. From there the passing game belonged to Drew Lock, and Lock threw Shaheed's way twice, both in the third quarter and both on the same drive: an incompletion on second and 13 and a four-yard catch on third and eight that left Seattle short and punting. That was the whole receiving line: three targets, one catch, four yards, on a night Seattle threw 24 passes and sent 11 of them to Jaxon Smith-Njigba.
The night's actual workload was on special teams. Shaheed returned all three New England kickoffs — 22 yards to the 24, 28 to the 30, and 30 to the 29 — and returned one punt nine yards to the New England 43, the only Seattle possession of the game that started in New England territory without a turnover. He fair-caught three other punts, and a fourth fair catch was wiped out by a roughing-the-kicker penalty on Seattle that gave New England a first down. 80 kickoff-return yards and nine on the punt are not nothing, but they are not the job the contract the preview cited describes.
Back in June the preview framed Shaheed as one question with two answers already on film: the large target share he carried in New Orleans against the smaller one Seattle's offense seemed to have room for, and it argued the size of the contract meant Seattle did not pay for the smaller version. August never put the first offense on a field, so the question rolled to Week 1 untouched. The first answer is three of 24, on a night the quarterback changed on the third dropback and the offense spent three quarters going nowhere. That is one data point with a large asterisk on it, and it is the small version. Next up is Arizona; the number to watch is targets, and whether a full week with Lock as the starter changes who gets them.
_Data via nflverse._
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