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Cleveland Browns Fantasy Outlook 2026

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By Sean Draper · Published September 15, 2026 · Last updated November 3, 2026 · Updated Tuesdays and Fridays through the season

Cleveland is the one offence in football where the most valuable fantasy asset caught two passes in the opener and nothing about that should worry you. Harold Fannin Jr. earned a target on 25.5% of his routes last season, second in the entire NFL, David Njoku is a Charger, and the man who hired himself as head coach — Todd Monken — spent the previous three years in Baltimore running an offence that fed its tight ends. Behind him the picture is bleaker and simpler than any projection makes it sound: a quarterback who has not thrown for 300 yards in nineteen starts as a Brown, a receiver room where two rookies passed a $17-million veteran inside one week, and a backfield that became one man the moment Dylan Sampson’s knee gave way on a first-quarter kickoff return. This is a per-opportunity roster on a team that will spend the year behind. Buy the roles, not the offence. All ranks and scoring on this page are 0.5 PPR unless stated otherwise.

Browns fantasy cheat sheet

Player	Pos	Where he’s going	Our verdict	Injury risk
Harold Fannin Jr.	TE	TE7 on Underdog; TE5 on our own board	Draft — top-five tight end, the best asset on this roster	Low
Quinshon Judkins	RB	RB20, ADP around 50	Buy — every-week RB2 now that he is alone	Out this week (foot); moderate historically (ankle and fibula, late 2025)
Denzel Boston	WR	Round 14 range, ADP around 165	Claim — our Week 2 waiver call after he led the team in receiving yards in Week 1	Low
KC Concepcion	WR	Round 11 range, ADP around 130	Draft late — team-high targets in the opener	Low
Jerry Jeudy	WR	WR65, ADP around 177	Fade — droppable in twelve-team leagues	Low
Deshaun Watson	QB	No stable published ADP	Fade in every format, superflex included	Elevated — five sacks in the opener
Shedeur Sanders	QB	No stable published ADP	Superflex stash only, and only as a bet on the calendar	— role, not injury
Dylan Sampson	RB	RB53, ADP around 168	Drop in every redraft format — he is on injured reserve for a minimum of four games	Severe (knee)
Browns D/ST	—	Unranked on our board	Ignore — Myles Garrett is a Ram	—

The one-line version: draft Harold Fannin Jr. as a top-five tight end, buy Quinshon Judkins as an every-week RB2, spend a late pick on Denzel Boston, and stay off every Cleveland quarterback.

The backfield: one man, and a kick returner on injured reserve

Quinshon Judkins’ opener looked like a disaster and was not. Twelve carries for 33 yards and two catches for 17 in a 34–10 loss is 5.0 PPR points, and it is also the least informative number on this page. The informative one is buried in the snap counts: Judkins played 83.8% of Cleveland’s early-down snaps, against a 61.1% baseline last season. His role got bigger inside a game his stat line says he lost.

Then Dylan Sampson took a kickoff back 27 yards with six minutes left in the first quarter and left on crutches with the knee braced. Cleveland placed him on injured reserve on Tuesday, September 15 — a minimum of four games — and promoted Jaleel McLaughlin from the practice squad in the same set of moves. ESPN’s Jeremy Fowler had reported significant missed time earlier in the week; the club has now made it formal. Behind Judkins: Jaleel McLaughlin, with Audric Estime as the third back; Raheim Sanders is on injured reserve. Jerome Ford, who owned third down last year, signed in Washington. There is no committee left to be worried about.

The 2025 profile underneath all this is worse than the role: 230 carries for 827 yards and seven scores at 3.6 yards a carry and 1.27 yards before contact, on a 67.3% opportunity share and an 8.3% target share. He is not efficient. He is not a receiving back. What he is, in a twelve-team league, is the only player on an NFL roster guaranteed fifteen to twenty touches a week, and that is worth more than a yards-per-carry figure earned behind last year’s offensive line. This one has been rebuilt from scratch — Joel Bitonio retired, Wyatt Teller, Jack Conklin and Ethan Pocic all left, and Cleveland spent real money on Zion Johnson and Elgton Jenkins and traded for Tytus Howard, then took Spencer Fano ninth overall.

Where we differ from our own board. Our Week 1 start/sit page told you to sit Judkins, and it said so in the sharpest language we have used on any player this season: “the worst script for a running back on the entire slate.” Cleveland was an 8.5-point underdog in a 40.5-point game and the call was right on its own terms — he scored five points. That call stays as published and it will be graded as published; we do not rewrite calls after the fact. But it was a call about one matchup, and after Week 1 it was being read as a call about a player. Sampson’s knee changed the role, not the matchup. From there Judkins became an every-week RB2 in 0.5 PPR, and the two positions are not in conflict.

Our verdict: buy Judkins, drop Sampson in every redraft format, and do not spend FAAB on Jaleel McLaughlin unless Judkins himself shows up on a Wednesday report.

Target share: two rookies passed a veteran in one week

Cleveland spent a first-round pick and a second-round pick on receivers in April, and by the second Sunday in September both of them were ahead of Jerry Jeudy. That is not a projection. It is the Week 1 route chart.

	Denzel Boston	KC Concepcion	Jerry Jeudy
Drafted	2nd round, No. 39 (Washington)	1st round, No. 24 (Texas A&M)	Fourth year in the league
Week 1 line	2 rec, 59 yds, 1 TD — team high in yards	4 rec, 43 yds on a team-high 5 targets	“Nearly non-existent” (PFF)
Week 1 usage	90%-plus of snaps in multiple personnel groupings	20 routes on 30 dropbacks; 80.6% of 11-personnel snaps	Snap rate down enough that PFF says drop him
2025 line	Rookie	Rookie	50 rec, 602 yds, 2 TD on 106 targets — 47.2% catch rate
ADP	~165	~130	177 (WR65)
Our verdict	Claim	Draft late	Drop

Boston is the cheaper of the two rookies and had the bigger Week 1 role, which is an unusual combination and the reason he is the claim rather than Concepcion. Concepcion is the better long-term asset and the one to draft if you are starting from scratch. After Week 1 we judged neither startable until the quarterback situation resolved — a 46-yard touchdown from a passer who took five sacks is a fine highlight and a bad weekly plan.

Jeudy is the fade. A 47.2% catch rate on 106 targets is not bad luck, it is a player the ball does not find cleanly, and he was passed by two rookies inside a single game in Week 1. At WR65 he is not costing anyone a draft pick worth arguing about; the point is that he is occupying a bench spot in leagues where Denzel Boston is free.

Deshaun Watson, and the clock behind him

Watson opened 16 of 22 for 205 yards with a touchdown, an interception, 38 rushing yards, a 97.7 rating — and five sacks. Todd Monken confirmed on September 14 that he anticipated Watson starting in Week 2 at Tampa Bay, and Watson has started every game since, including Cleveland’s Week 6 win over Baltimore. Shedeur Sanders is QB2. Dillon Gabriel is on injured reserve with a back injury and is not expected back before the middle of October. CBS’s Garrett Podell put the ceiling plainly: Watson has thrown for 300-plus yards in exactly none of his nineteen games as a Brown.

Sanders is not the answer either, or at least not one you can draft. He was pressured on 51% of his dropbacks in 2025, the highest rate in the NFL, behind an offensive line that has since been replaced wholesale — which is the single best argument that this year could look different, and still not an argument for rostering him in a single-quarterback league.

Our verdict: no Cleveland quarterback belongs on a fantasy roster. In superflex, Sanders is a legitimate stash, because every Cleveland pass-catcher’s rest-of-season value is a bet on when the change happens rather than if — the Akron Beacon Journal has him starting by Week 6, Sportsnaut said Week 3 — and you would rather own the change than react to it. In one-quarterback formats, stream literally anybody else.

Harold Fannin Jr.: the call we most want to be graded on

Fannin caught two passes for 21 yards in the opener and we are telling you to draft him as a top-five tight end. Here is why that is not stubbornness.

As a rookie he finished TE7 in PPR at 11.7 points a game on a 77.2% snap share (16th at the position) and 72.2% route participation (19th). Those are ordinary. The number that is not ordinary is his target-per-route rate of 25.5%, second in the entire NFL, at 2.18 yards per route run, eighth. Across his nine healthy games Fantasy Life has him at a 27% target share and 7.1 targets a game — second only to Trey McBride — on the way to 72 catches for 731 yards and six scores.

Then the two structural changes. David Njoku, who took 33 catches off him last year, is gone. And Todd Monken is the head coach, having spent three seasons in Baltimore where the tight end room ate every week. PFF’s Week 1 charting says his package never shrank in the blowout: all of Cleveland’s 12-personnel snaps and 90% of its third downs. Two catches was a game-script artifact, not a demotion.

Where we differ from our own board. In Week 2 our live injury report told readers to “treat every Cleveland pass-catcher as a downgrade rather than a buy” while the quarterback situation sorted itself out, and our Week 2 rankings put Fannin at TE8 rather than top five. We are carving out one exception and we want it on the record rather than buried: that instruction is right for Jeudy, right for Concepcion and right for Boston as weekly starters, and wrong for Fannin as a draft asset. That weekly board was pricing one game in Tampa Bay that Cleveland was expected to spend two scores behind; this page is pricing a season. A bad quarterback suppresses downfield receivers far more than he suppresses the man running a five-yard option route on 25% of his snaps. Fannin’s value is extracted at the line of scrimmage, which is the one place Deshaun Watson can still function.

Our verdict: draft him at TE7 and treat him as a top-five tight end for the season. The risk you are accepting is that Cleveland throws so few competitive passes that even a 27% share is thin — a real risk on a 6–11 team. We think target concentration in a bad offence beats target dilution in a good one at this price, and we would rather be wrong on that than on anything else on this page.

Injury watch

As of Tue, Nov. 3, Cleveland’s backfield is clear on paper: neither Quinshon Judkins nor Dylan Sampson carries a designation on our status feed, though both have managed lower-leg issues at various points this season. QB Dillon Gabriel has cleared the back injury that had him on injured reserve since September and is now listed Out only as a coach’s decision; Raheim Sanders (hip) remains on injured reserve. Backup RB Audric Estime and backup QB Taylen Green are both down as coach’s decisions, WR Bub Means is Out with a knee injury, and TE Joe Royer remains on the PUP list. KC Concepcion, who missed time earlier this season with a concussion, no longer carries a designation. The table below updates automatically from our status feed and editorial desk.

Statuses updated Nov 4, 12:26 pm EST. Status data: Sleeper.

Report current as of Tuesday, November 3, 2026. The table above refreshes automatically from our status feed; offensive linemen and defenders are covered in the commentary above rather than the table, which is built for fantasy rosters. Check our half-PPR rankings, start/sit calls and live injury report for anything that moves before kickoff.

Team forecast: why we have Cleveland at 6–11

Fantasy production depends on game script, and game script depends on whether this team is competitive. We scanned sixteen independent projections. The consensus lands just over five wins, and every named human on the board is on the under. We are the optimists here, by nearly a full win, which felt like an uncomfortable place to be after the 34–10 opener; Cleveland has won its three games since.

Source	Type	Wins	Finish / Call
PFF season model	Model	6.07	Above the market line
DraftKings (via CBS Sports)	Market	5.5	Over −125 / Under +105
DraftKings (via FOX Sports)	Market	5.5	Over −125 / Under +105
DraftKings (via Sports Illustrated)	Market	5.5	Over −130 / Under +110
BetMGM	Market	5.5	Under priced at +100
Fanatics Sportsbook	Market	5.5	House lean: Over
NFL.com (Tom Blair)	Analyst	5–12	Written in May, before the Garrett trade
Chris Easterling, Akron Beacon Journal	Analyst	5–12	0–3 start; Sanders takes over by Week 6
Gary Davenport, Bleacher Report	Analyst	4–13	“Smash” the under — his highest-confidence bet in the league
Daniel Dobish, Athlon Sports	Analyst	4–13	Cleveland “locks up the No. 1 overall pick”
R.J. White, CBS Sports Betting	Analyst	—	Under 5.5 (+105); also likes Cleveland for fewest wins at +850
Josh Edwards, CBS Sports	Analyst	—	Under 5.5 (+115)
CBS Sports SportsLine simulation	Model	—	7.1% playoff odds
Garrett Podell, CBS Sports	Analyst	—	Last in the AFC North
Matt Johnson, Sportsnaut	Power ranking	—	No. 32 after Week 1
Warren Sharp, Sharp Football Analysis	Analyst	—	Number paywalled; free excerpt notes the 4th-easiest schedule
This site	Our call	6–11	4th, AFC North — no playoffs

Why we are over. The entire case is that the 2025 Browns were the worst offence in football by yards per play — 4.3, dead last — behind a line that has since been demolished and rebuilt. Out: Joel Bitonio to retirement, plus Wyatt Teller, Jack Conklin, Ethan Pocic, Cam Robinson and Cornelius Lucas. In: Zion Johnson on three years and $49.5 million, Elgton Jenkins on two and $24 million, Tytus Howard by trade, and Spencer Fano with the ninth overall pick. That is five new or re-signed starters and roughly $120 million of interior line, and the last-place offence it is protecting has nowhere to go but up. Warren Sharp’s free preview excerpt grades Cleveland the fourth-easiest schedule in the league. PFF’s model is the only public projection above the market at 6.07, and we are with it.

Why we are not higher. Two things cap this, and neither is fixable in-season. The first is the quarterback: a passer with no 300-yard game in nineteen tries, a backup who led the league in pressure rate, and a third option on injured reserve until mid-October. The second is that Myles Garrett is a Los Angeles Ram. Cleveland got Jared Verse, a 2027 first, a 2028 second and a conditional 2029 third, which is a defensible haul and does nothing for 2026. A defence that just traded its only genuinely elite player does not win the close games a six-win team has to win.

Where we sit against the field: every named analyst on that board is on the under, and we are on the other side of all of them. We are also boxed in from above by our own pages — our Steelers outlook already has Pittsburgh splitting with Cleveland, our Ravens outlook has Baltimore sweeping, and our Bengals outlook has Cincinnati splitting, which fixes Cleveland at 2–4 in the division before we write a word. Six wins means going 4–7 outside it. We think the schedule supports that; the 34–10 opener was a poor start to the argument, and the three wins since have been a better one.

Game-by-game, and what it means for your lineup

Wk	Opponent	Site	Pick	Record
1	Jacksonville Jaguars	Away	W — graded: miss	1–0
2	Tampa Bay Buccaneers	Away	W	2–0
3	Carolina Panthers	Home	L	2–1
4	Pittsburgh Steelers	Home · TNF	L	2–2
5	New York Jets	Away	L	2–3
6	Baltimore Ravens	Home	L	2–4
7	Tennessee Titans	Away	L — graded: miss (Cleveland won 27–24)	2–5
8	Pittsburgh Steelers	Away	W	3–5
9	New Orleans Saints	Away	L	3–6
10	Houston Texans	Home	L	3–7
11	Bye	—	—	3–7
12	Las Vegas Raiders	Home	L	3–8
13	Cincinnati Bengals	Home	W	4–8
14	Atlanta Falcons	Home	W	5–8
15	New York Giants	Away	L	5–9
16	Baltimore Ravens	Away	L	5–10
17	Indianapolis Colts	Home	W	6–10
18	Cincinnati Bengals	Away	L	6–11

• Weeks 2–10 — the sell window we flagged after Week 1. We had Cleveland 2–7 across this stretch on our picks, with five of those nine on the road; Cleveland instead won the first three games of it. A team trailing by two scores throws, which is good for Fannin’s target share and bad for everything Judkins does after the first quarter.
• Week 11 bye — awkward, but not the worst in the division. It sits later than Cincinnati’s Week 6 and Pittsburgh’s Week 9, earlier than Baltimore’s Week 13, and it lands two weeks before most leagues open their brackets. You can plan around it; you cannot ignore it if you are carrying both Fannin and Judkins.
• Weeks 15–17 — the only good news on the calendar. New York and Baltimore on the road are both fades, but Week 17 at home against Indianapolis is a genuine green light, and championship week is the one that pays. If you own Fannin, this is the week he wins you a title or loses you one.
• The counterintuitive one: the two games we have Cleveland winning in the second half of the season are both at home against teams with better records — Cincinnati in Week 13 and Indianapolis in Week 17 — while the “easy” home games against Carolina in Week 3 and Las Vegas in Week 12 are losses on our board. Bad teams do not lose in the order their schedule suggests. Do not bench a Brown because the opponent looks strong, and do not start one because the opponent looks weak; in Cleveland, the total is the only thing that has predicted anything.

Frequently asked

Should I draft Harold Fannin Jr. in 2026?

Yes — take him at his TE7 price and treat him as a top-five tight end for the season. As a rookie he finished TE7 in PPR at 11.7 points a game with a 25.5% target-per-route rate, second in the NFL, and 2.18 yards per route run, eighth. Across nine healthy games Fantasy Life has him at a 27% target share and 7.1 targets a game, second only to Trey McBride. David Njoku left for the Chargers, and head coach Todd Monken arrives from three years of feeding tight ends in Baltimore. His two-catch opener was a blowout artifact — PFF charted him on every 12-personnel snap and 90% of third downs. Our Week 2 board had him at TE8 for that week specifically, which was a matchup call rather than a change of mind.

Is Quinshon Judkins a must-start after the Dylan Sampson injury?

Yes, as an every-week RB2 in 0.5 PPR. Sampson hurt his knee on a first-quarter kickoff return in Week 1 and Cleveland placed him on injured reserve on September 15, a minimum of four games. Jerome Ford left for Washington in the offseason, so the depth behind Judkins is Jaleel McLaughlin and Audric Estime, with Raheim Sanders on injured reserve. Judkins already played 83.8% of Cleveland’s early-down snaps in the opener, up from a 61.1% baseline. The efficiency is genuinely poor — 3.6 yards a carry and 1.27 yards before contact last year — but volume at this price wins. This does update our Week 1 start/sit call, which was a matchup fade and stays on the record as published.

Who is the Browns’ starting quarterback in 2026?

Deshaun Watson, who has started every game this season, including the Week 6 win over Baltimore; Todd Monken first confirmed him as the starter on September 14. Shedeur Sanders is the backup and Dillon Gabriel is on injured reserve with a back injury, not expected before the middle of October. For fantasy purposes none of the three is rosterable in a single-quarterback league: Watson has not thrown for 300 yards in any of his nineteen starts as a Brown, and Sanders was pressured on 51% of his dropbacks last season, the highest rate in the NFL. In superflex, Sanders is a defensible stash purely as a bet on the coaching staff making a change.

Should I drop Jerry Jeudy?

In twelve-team leagues, yes. Jeudy caught 50 of 106 targets for 602 yards and two touchdowns last season — a 47.2% catch rate — and in Week 1 both rookie receivers passed him: Denzel Boston led the team in receiving yards and KC Concepcion led it in targets, while PFF wrote that Jeudy’s snap rate had “decreased too much for him to remain on fantasy rosters in most redraft leagues.” He is going at WR65, so nobody spent a real pick on him. The point is the bench spot, and Boston is usually free.

Will the Browns make the playoffs in 2026?

No. We have Cleveland at 6–11 and fourth in the AFC North, which is a win above the 5.16-win consensus across the sixteen projections we scanned and still nowhere near the field. CBS’s SportsLine simulation gives Cleveland a 7.1% playoff chance. Our own division pages already fix the Browns at 2–4 inside the AFC North — swept by Baltimore, splitting with Pittsburgh and Cincinnati — so six wins requires 4–7 against everybody else.

When is the Browns bye week in 2026?

Week 11. It falls between Cincinnati’s Week 6 and Pittsburgh’s Week 9 on one side and Baltimore’s Week 13 on the other, and it lands comfortably before most fantasy playoff brackets open. If you are carrying both Harold Fannin Jr. and Quinshon Judkins, that is the one week you need a plan for, because they are the only two Browns you will be starting.

Prediction tracker

Updated every Tuesday. Last update: November 3, 2026 — seven games graded, and we are 2 of 7. We had Cleveland winning at Jacksonville (it didn’t), correctly caught the upset at Tampa Bay, had them losing to Carolina (they won instead), had them losing to Pittsburgh on Thursday night (they won that too), correctly had them losing at the Jets, 17–12, in Week 5, had them losing to Baltimore in Week 6 (they won that one too, 13–10), and had them losing at Tennessee in Week 7 (they won that one too, 27–24). Our above-consensus 6–11 call is looking very light: Cleveland is 5–2, and a defense we barely wrote about is allowing 20.9 points a game through seven weeks — still a top-third unit by our count and the biggest reason a supposedly bad offence keeps winning games on our board. At this pace Cleveland would blow well past our preseason win total; we are not revising the call off a seven-game sample, but we are saying plainly that it is running hot. The prediction stays as published; we mark misses, we do not re-cut them.

Metric	Predicted	Actual	Delta
Team record	6–11	5–2 through 7 games	Running well ahead of the pace a 6–11 season implies; the gap widened again with the Week 7 win at Tennessee
AFC North finish	4th	—	—
Division record	2–4	2–0 (beat Pittsburgh in Week 4, beat Baltimore in Week 6)	Ahead of pace — we had both of those games as losses
Points allowed rank	— — we did not write much about the defense	20.9 ppg through 7 games	A tick up from 20.3 a week ago but still a plus unit — this defense has quietly become a positive on a team we projected to be bad on both sides of the ball
Playoffs	No	—	—
Fannin positional finish	Top-five TE	—	—
Judkins positional finish	Top-24 RB	—	—
Fannin leads team in receptions	Yes	—	—
Boston finishes above Jeudy	Yes	—	—
Games called correctly	—	2 of 7	Correct on the Week 2 upset at Tampa Bay and the Week 5 loss at the Jets; missed Jacksonville, Carolina, Pittsburgh, and the Week 6 and Week 7 wins over Baltimore and Tennessee

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Keep going

• Half-PPR fantasy rankings
• Start/Sit calls — including the Quinshon Judkins sit we revisit above
• 2026 team fantasy outlooks — every team we have written up so far
• Baltimore Ravens fantasy outlook — the division winner on our board at 11–6, sweeping Cleveland in Weeks 6 and 16
• Cincinnati Bengals fantasy outlook — 10–7 and the last AFC seed, splitting with Cleveland in Weeks 13 and 18
• Pittsburgh Steelers fantasy outlook — 8–9 and third, splitting with Cleveland in Weeks 4 and 8
• Live injury report — every Browns designation, refreshed four times a day
• Our track record — every call we make against consensus, graded after the games

Sources: ClevelandBrowns.com, ESPN, CBS Sports, FOX Sports, Sports Illustrated, NFL.com, Bleacher Report, Athlon Sports, Sportsnaut, Akron Beacon Journal via Yahoo Sports, Pro Football Rumors, Pro Football Network, PFF, FTN Fantasy, Fantasy Life, FantasyPros, Fantasy Football Calculator, Underdog via 4for4, Sharp Football Analysis, BetMGM, DraftKings, Fanatics Sportsbook, Wikipedia. Odds, ADP and injury data current as of September 15, 2026. Analysis, not betting advice. This page is updated as news breaks; player statuses render live from our injury feed.