NYG · TE
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Theo Johnson opened the 2025 season as the clear starter at tight end for the New York Giants, and the usage backed it up: fifteen games started, an 86.5% share of offensive snaps, and 74 targets funneled his way over the season. That is a real role in an offense, not a token one, and the 13 red-zone targets show the team trusted him in scoring situations. But the 2026 season has begun very differently. Through two games his snap share has been cut nearly in half to 46.4%, and his target count has dropped to five for the pair of games. That is the picture of a competition to date, not a stripped role. Isaiah Likely now sits atop the Giants tight end depth chart, and the early-season snap distribution suggests the team is actively working him into a larger share of the passing-game reps that used to belong to Johnson. Jaxson Dart, in his first year as the starting quarterback, is the one deciding where those targets go play to play, and early returns say he is spreading them differently than last season's staff did. The résumé from 2025 was legitimate. The 2026 role, at least so far, is a shared one, and Johnson is no longer the automatic first read at the position on early-season snap counts.
The case for Theo Johnson starts with the 2025 tape. A tight end who plays 86.5% of his team's snaps and pulls in 74 targets across fifteen starts is not a marginal contributor — he finished as the TE18 in PPR scoring with 127.8 points on the year, an 8.5 points-per-game rate that would clear the flex bar in most weeks. The 13 red-zone targets matter too, because touchdown opportunity at tight end is scarce and the Giants clearly looked his way when the field shortened. If that role simply resumed in 2026, there would be little reason to worry about him. The case against is what has actually happened through two games. A snap share of 46.4% is roughly half of what he carried a season ago, and the target count of five with only one catch and 9 receiving yards is not a small-sample fluke so much as it is consistent with a genuine change in how the offense is using its tight ends. Isaiah Likely now holds the top spot on the depth chart, and the Giants appear to be building looks toward him rather than defaulting to Johnson the way they did last year. Jaxson Dart, making his first extended run as a starting quarterback, has his own learning curve to work through, and early-season quarterbacks in new starting roles often lean on whichever pass-catcher the coaching staff has scripted in that week rather than establishing a fixed pecking order right away. That instability cuts against banking on Johnson's 2025 numbers repeating. The honest read is that Johnson's ceiling from a year ago is proven, but his floor right now is muddled by a real depth-chart challenge. A catch rate of 60.8% last season on 74 targets and 11.7 yards per catch describe a competent possession-and-move-the-chains tight end, not an explosive one, which means his value has always depended on receiving volume rather than big-play upside. When that volume was 74 targets across a season, the profile worked. When it is five targets across two games, there isn't enough there to trust. Whether he reclaims a larger snap share depends on how the coaching staff resolves the rotation with Likely, and how comfortable Dart becomes distributing to his tight ends as the season goes on. Until the snap and target counts move back toward last year's levels, treat the 2025 numbers as a description of what he can do in the right role, not a guarantee of what he is doing in this one.
Treat Theo Johnson as a bench piece right now, not a lineup lock. The 2025 season proved he can be a productive tight end when the offense funnels volume his way — 74 targets, 127.8 PPR points, an 8.5-point weekly average — but the 46.4% snap share and five targets through two games in 2026 tell a different story about his current standing behind Isaiah Likely on the depth chart. Managers who drafted him off last year's role should hold rather than start him in a settled lineup spot until the target distribution with Jaxson Dart under center stabilizes. If you already own him, this is a stash-and-monitor situation rather than a cut. His prior-year red-zone usage and snap totals show real offensive trust existed once, and that kind of role does not always disappear cleanly — it can shift back if Likely's usage cools or if Dart settles into a rhythm that favors Johnson in certain packages. Watch the next few weeks of snap-share and target data closely. If his snap percentage climbs back toward last year's 86.5% range or his weekly targets return to multiple looks a game, he becomes streamable again in tight-end-needy weeks. Until then, he belongs on the bench or, in shallower leagues, on the waiver wire rather than in an active flex spot.
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