Todd Monken was hired by the Cleveland Browns to be their new head coach based in large part on his long career as an assistant on the offensive side of the ball. It is where the Browns needed the most improvement, and it is there that Monken is expected to bring out the best from a talented group of young players.
In Monken’s most recent history, he has worked with some of the best tight ends in the game, either in college at the University of Georgia with Brock Bowers, or in the NFL with Mark Andrews and Isaiah Likely on the Baltimore Ravens. That background should bode very well for one Cleveland player in particular.
ESPN analyst Ben Solak is predicting that Browns tight end Harold Fannin Jr. could emerge as one of the league’s “most dangerous” players at his position in his upcoming second NFL season.
“Monken rightfully built his Georgia systems around Bowers. Does Fannin demand that level of heliocentrism? Not yet. Bowers has a rugged toughness that serves him well downfield, and I’m not all the way there on Fannin as a three-level threat. But Fannin has everything that elite receiving tight ends need to have in the modern NFL. As long as he clears the manageable bar of ‘functional blocking,’ he’ll become a household name as one of the league’s most dangerous tight ends,” Solak wrote.
Fannin was selected in the third round of the 2025 NFL Draft as the likely eventual successor to veteran David Njoku in Cleveland. That ascension came much earlier than anyone anticipated, and Fannin led the entire team in receptions, yards and touchdowns last season.
Of course, that has a lot to do with the play of Cleveland’s wide receivers, a group that ranked last in the NFL in those three categories. However, that unit is expected to improve with the addition of 2026 NFL Draft picks KC Concepcion and Denzel Boston.
That could change Fannin’s role and target share somewhat, but as an offensive coordinator, Monken not only relied heavily on two-tight end sets, but he also made sure that those players were featured prominently in the passing game. That includes Bowers, who went on from winning back-to-back national championships with Monken at Georgia to setting NFL rookie records as a first-round pick of the Las Vegas Raiders in the 2024 draft.
Also compared to Hall of Famer Antonio Gates, if Fannin can come anywhere close to the kind of production Bowers has shown in the NFL, the Browns could indeed have one of the best tight ends in the league at their disposal.
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