The Opening Drive 7/10: Harold Fannin Jr. Among the NFL's Top Tight Ends According to League Evaluators
The second-year tight end might not produce the same numbers but the league knows the talent.
Another set of positional analysis from ESPN and another Browns player has appeared. Despite not making the Top-10 at the position, Browns tight end Harold Fannin Jr. has made the honorable mention category and justifiably so.
Fannin finished his rookie season with 72 catches for 731 yards and six touchdowns on 107 targets, leading the Browns in every one of those categories by a wide margin. He did it across three different starting quarterbacks, through a groin injury that eventually ended his season a game early, and against a backdrop where the only other Cleveland pass catcher to reach even 35 catches or 50 targets was Jerry Jeudy. Those are gaudy numbers for a third-round rookie tight end.
"His arrow is up. He's a chess piece that can maneuver in space. He should be a 100-catch guy." -- NFC executive
Fannin wasn’t just productive last year. He was the offense. David Njoku got hurt and eventually landed in Los Angeles this offseason. The receiver room outside of Jeudy had almost nothing behind it. Flacco, Gabriel, and Sanders rotated through under center with no real continuity. In that environment, defenses knew exactly where the ball was going and Fannin still won anyway, tying for the NFL lead in receptions when the defense got pressure and posting the second-best passer rating in the league when targeted under duress.
Two other tight ends appeared in the top-10 from Fannin’s rookie class in Tyler Warren in Indianapolis and Colston Loveland in Chicago — both first round selections. Warren carries more belief in his ability to impact the passing game and produce effective in-line blocking snaps. "He lived up to expectations," an NFC scout said. "He's a true Y who can handle the point-of-attack run game assignments but carried over his versatile, game-impacting receiving ability that showed up during his Penn State days."
Loveland checked in at 7th overall with most of his exciement stemming from the pass catcher he can be in Ben Johnson’s offense. "[Loveland] could be the Bears' top receiver next year," an NFL personnel evaluator said. "Expect to see more two- or three-tight-end sets from Chicago this year."
Fannin will have to keep fighting to earn the reputation of his peers selected in the first round. Some of that might come from continued production, some might come from more Cleveland team success, but this is where the conversation gets tricky for the Browns offense in 2026 and Fannin in particular.
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Despite all of his success, if you dig into the Browns team numbers and Fannin’s target share, it was a symptom of exactly how broken the 2025 offense was.
That’s why 2026 is such an interesting test case for how to read his box score. If Fannin’s raw target count drops from 107, or his catches dip below 72, the instinct will be to call it a regression or wonder if the offense is misusing its best weapon. It’s worth resisting that instinct.
Todd Monken didn’t get hired to build an offense that runs through one bailout option. His track record says the opposite. In Baltimore, Mark Andrews and Isaiah Likely both mattered without either one needing to eat 25 percent of the team’s targets, because Derrick Henry was hammering people on the ground and the receiver room was deep enough to keep defenses honest. He’s also had other stints in the NFL where production was spread around — even just looking at his time with Freddie Kitchens. In that 2019 season Nick Chubb ran for nearly 1,500 yards while Jarvis Landry and Odell Beckham Jr. both cleared 1,000 receiving yards in the same season, something the franchise had never done before. Monken aims to spread production wide enough that no single player’s target share tells the whole story but it can also end up misleading analysts about Fannin’s second year.
The Browns spent this offseason trying to build exactly that kind of depth around Fannin instead of just adding more to his plate. The receiver room got real investment. Quinshon Judkins is entering year two as one of the more productive rookie backs in the league and should only get more efficient behind a revamped approach in offensive line personnel and scheme. The quarterback competition, whatever it settles into between Watson and Sanders, at least offers more continuity than last year’s carousel. If that supporting cast does its job, Fannin’s target total should come down not because Monken is force-feeding someone else, but because he won’t be the only reliable option on the field anymore.
The number to actually watch isn’t targets or catches. It’s efficiency and role. Fannin caught 67.3 percent of his targets last year with a 41.1 percent success rate, and did that work as essentially the only proven weapon on the field. If he’s still winning at that clip in 2026 while seeing fewer forced-feed targets, that’s a tight end who’s become more dangerous, not less, inside an offense that finally has other answers. The version of this story that should actually worry Browns fans is the one where Fannin still leads the team in targets by 40 or 50 the way he did last year. That would mean nothing else received the necessary growth. A smaller scale but more efficient box score from Fannin, paired with more balance everywhere else, is the best-case outcome for this offense, not a step back for him.
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I’ve been saying similar things about Fannin. I think his target share probably goes down and his efficiency improves, both due to the improved WR room. I think the best version of Fannin is not having to be force-fed the ball because they can spread it around, but he has 1-2 plays a game where he gets the ball with enough room to get a head of steam and bounce off of 3+ would be tacklers.