a 72-catch rookie tight end (TE6 total) who shared the room with David Njoku, now gone, priced at his shared-role finish. Same player, vacated targets, a bad offense the only cap.
Harold Fannin Jr. 2026 Season Preview — a 72-catch rookie who just got the room to himself
Show notes & transcript▾
Harold Fannin Junior caught seventy-two passes as a rookie tight end — while sharing the position with a Pro Bowler. That Pro Bowler is now gone, and Fannin is the sixth tight end off the board. The runway just cleared, and the price hasn't caught up. The Muffed 2026 preview.
The 2025 season was an exceptional rookie line at a hard position: seventy-two catches on a hundred seven targets for seven hundred thirty-one yards and six touchdowns, eleven-seven a game, the number-eight tight end per game and sixth in total — and he did it sharing targets with David Njoku, on one of the league's worst offenses. The signature was an eight-catch, a hundred fourteen-yard, one-score day against Tennessee in Week 14. Seventy-two catches as a rookie tight end is genuinely rare.
The arc is one year, but it's the right kind of one year: elite receiving volume from a rookie, the stickiest thing the position offers. We don't bank year-two leaps blindly, but we don't need a leap here — we need the targets that just opened up.
What repeats: the volume and the role. A hundred-seven-target rookie tight end is a foundation, not a fluke, and his touchdown rate is moderate, so there's no luck to surrender. The one drag is the offense itself — Cleveland's passing game was among the league's worst, which caps the ceiling until the quarterback play improves.
The situation, per the reports, is the unlock: Cleveland let David Njoku walk in free agency precisely because Fannin outplayed him, elevating Fannin to the unquestioned number-one tight end with a clear runway to TE1 production. He outshone a Pro Bowler as a rookie; now he gets that Pro Bowler's targets too.
The price: pick eighty-eight, the sixth tight end. Verdict: LEAN — underpriced. He finished TE6 in total while sharing the room, and now the room is his — same player, more targets, priced at his shared-role finish. The counter: the Cleveland offense is genuinely bad and the quarterback situation is unsettled, which caps how high the volume can carry him. But a seventy-two-catch rookie tight end with vacated targets ahead of him, at TE6, is value.
September watch: the target share with Njoku gone — if it climbs toward eight or nine a game, the leap is on; and the quarterback play, the one thing capping the offense. Your guys, every week. Next preview's queued.
Play fantasy? There's a version of this about your whole roster — build your show, free →
2025: 72 catches for 731 yards, 6 TDs on 107 targets; 13 rushing yards, 1 rushing TDs (16 games)
More episodes
2025 ReviewMay 11, 2026Harold Fannin 2025 Season in Review
TE6 on the season — 16 games, 11.7 PPR/game
▾
Harold Fannin 2025 Season in Review
TE6 on the season — 16 games, 11.7 PPR/game
Show notes & transcript
Harold Fannin finished 2025 as the number 6 tight end in total PPR scoring and the number 8 tight end on a per-game basis — a top-tier fantasy finish at one of the thinnest positions in football, delivered on a Browns team that won five games and ranked 31st in offensive expected points added. That's the headline: Fannin smashed his rookie projection while playing for an offense that mostly got muffed. He became Cleveland's verified number one receiver, out-targeting and out-producing the entire wideout room on a roster that cycled through quarterbacks and never solved its pass protection. Sixteen games. Six receiving touchdowns, one on the ground, and a workload that grew into true featured-tight-end territory. For a rookie tight end on a bottom-three passing offense, that's a genuinely loud season.
Now let's dig into the numbers. Fannin caught 72 balls for 731 yards and six scores on 107 targets, averaging 11.7 PPR per game — the line that slotted him eighth at the position per game. The volume is the story: a 22 percent target share and 19 percent air yards share is alpha-receiver usage, not tight-end usage, and this Cleveland passing game finished dead last in the league in passing expected points added at minus 175.1. He piled up 352 yards after the catch, averaging 5.14 per reception with a plus 1.22 mark above expectation — when the ball got to him, he created extra. This was a steady-floor profile with selective spikes: he cleared 10 PPR in nine of sixteen games, ceilinged at 25.4 against the Titans and 19.5 against the Bills, and his worst stretches were quiet rather than zeros. The boom weeks came from touchdowns and explosives. The floor came from sheer looks — a 22 percent target share on a team that threw 611 times is a mountain of volume, even on a bad offense.
The play that captured the whole season came in Week 13 against the 49ers — second and 9, 47 seconds left in the first half, Browns down 7 to nothing, ball at the San Francisco 34. Shedeur Sanders dropped back in shotgun and hit Fannin deep left for a 34-yard touchdown — 25 air yards, 9 yards after the catch, worth more than four expected points on a single snap. That's the season in one play: a rookie tight end deployed as the deep-shot target on a struggling offense, winning down the field, producing the kind of explosive that kept his fantasy line afloat in an 8-to-26 loss. The Browns lost the game. Fannin managers won the week.
Want Harold Fannin on your weekly show?
Build a free show around Harold Fannin (and your other guys) right now — no signup. Want it in your inbox every week of the 2026 season? Drop your email once you've built it.