Chris Olave caught 100 balls last season and scored 9 times, nearly doubling his total from his first three years in the league. The former first-round pick has established himself as one of the higher-floor options in the sport, and an encouraging rookie campaign from Tyler Shough opened our eyes to some upside that we were blind to prior.
Can No. 12 build on his success from last season and be one of the top-10 performers at the position in 2026?
Should You Draft Chris Olave in Fantasy Football?
We don’t always know how to feel about Olave as a fantasy asset entering any NFL season, but this year it feels like there’s more excitement building up for him.
Olave has an ADP of 29.2. His PFN rank is a little higher at 27, and he’s WR13 on PFN’s rankings with a projected points per game of pretty much exactly 15 heading into this 2026 regular season.
He was a 1,000-yard receiver in all 3 seasons thus far in which he played double-digit games, and he’s coming off the best fantasy season of his career, roughly half of which came with Tyler Shough at quarterback.
Olave ranked sixth in PPR and half-PPR leagues with 100 catches and a career-high 9 touchdowns on 156 targets. That target figure ranked fifth in the entire NFL. It’s top-shelf target volume, and Olave is in line to see that kind of target share again in 2026, in my opinion.
First-round rookie Jordyn Tyson could miss up to two months with a hamstring injury, and that was unfortunately the story of his entire draft evaluation. Can he stay healthy? He never played a full season in college, and already the injury bug is rearing its ugly head. There’s very little target competition behind Tyson in that receiving corps as well, and that’s clearing the way for Olave to command clear WR1 volume right from the start.
He’s not strictly a three-level threat, with middling yards-after-catch numbers. But he’s a silky-smooth separator with inside-outside appeal and reliable hands, and the short and intermediate game is where he thrives.
You could argue that Olave’s production depends partly on Tyler Shough’s development, but we forget that even when Shough was a rookie, when games were split between him and Spencer Rattler, Olave still delivered quality WR1 fantasy production. I think that even with QB instability, Olave has proven that, at the very least, he can be a target funnel, a safety blanket for whoever is under center, and that’s a good thing for his security as a fantasy asset.
The Saints also had a top-5 passing play rate in 2025 and are sure to have a high passing percentage again in 2026, as an imperfect defense that’s also succumbed to injuries in some respects forces them into negative game scripts. Olave, in my opinion, is the chief volume earner in a Saints offense that may funnel the ball to him even before factoring in Tyson’s availability issues. As such, Olave is a resounding must-draft in the third round.
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Chris Olave’s Week 1 Fantasy Outlook
Analysis provided by PFN Analyst Kyle Soppe.
The hamstring injury to Jordyn Tyson resulted in some elevating their Olave expectations in a major way, but doesn’t that just bring us back to where we were last season?
Through 3 weeks of 2025, Olave led the NFL in targets, and I’m assuming elite usage until we get any sort of signal that a different scheme is in place. He was the only Saints receiver with 500 receiving yards a year ago and meshed with Tyler Shough in a way that he had yet to see from him (9 TD receptions after scoring 10 times in the first 39 contests of his career).
This is an offense that moves with tempo by choice, and the firepower of the Lions gives Olave every chance to clear 10 targets in this spot. You’re starting him every week, and if you’re stacking up Detroit in DFS, I think you have to roster a bringback (Olave if you’re paying up, Juwan Johnson if you’re not).
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Where Olave Ranks Among 2026 Wide Receivers
- Drake London | ATL
- Nico Collins | HOU
- A.J. Brown | NE
- George Pickens | DAL
- Rashee Rice | KC
- Chris Olave | NO
- Zay Flowers | BAL
- Tee Higgins | CIN
- Jaylen Waddle | DEN
- DeVonta Smith | PHI
- Ladd McConkey | LAC
Want to dive in more? PFN’s Complete PPR Wide Receiver Rankings are updated weekly.
