Team Intelligence · AFC North · 2026 preseason

Cleveland Is a Middle-of-the-League Offense, and the Market Knows It.

The model forecasts a bottom-10 scoring offense — 20.5 points a game, 28th — with its best fantasy real estate at running back (18th), and the market has it priced about right — the two disagree by 3 places, inside the bar this series sets before calling anything mispriced. Comparable offenses have supported 2.2 fantasy starters.

ADY
Auto Draft Years
17 August 2026 · 9 min read
20.5
proj points/game (28th)
2.2
expected fantasy starters
RB 18th
relative strength
+3
market vs model, in places

The short version

  • 2026 forecast: 20.5 points a game (28th), moves +4.1 points a game against 2025.
  • Relative strength running back (18th); relative weakness receiver (26th).
  • Comparable offenses supported 2.2 fantasy starters (bear 1, bull 3).
  • Market vs model: fairly priced — 3 places apart.
  • No player on this roster clears the bar as a buy. Fade Harold Fannin and KC Concepcion.

Cleveland Browns scored 16.4 points a game in 2025, 31st in the league. The model forecasts 20.5 for 2026, 28th. Every page in this series then asks the same two questions of that forecast — how many fantasy starters does an offense like this actually support, and is the market charging the right price for them — and answers both from the data rather than from the shape of the template. So the question for Cleveland is not about the offense at all — the market has the team priced about right. It is about Harold Fannin and KC Concepcion, where the model and the price come apart.

Who this offense actually is

Over 2021–2025 this offense scored 20.5/21.2/22.8/15.2/16.4 points a game and threw on 51.8/50.4/55.4/62.8/56.9 percent of its snaps. Two separate readings come out of that. Its level: 16.4 in 2025, 2.8 points below its own five-year mean of 19.2. Its trend: a five-year slope of -1.4 points a season, which is genuinely declining. Both point the same way.

Across the same window it has thrown more and more (+2.3 points of pass rate a season). In 2025 it ran 57.6 snaps from scrimmage a game, 24th in the league. That is play volume, not pace: it counts snaps, and snaps are driven as much by first downs, turnovers and game script as by how fast a team chooses to play. Genuine situation-neutral pace is not in this dataset, so this series does not claim it.

Five-year trajectory
Cleveland Browns: scoring, pass rate and volume, 2021–2026
Solid line is points per game against the left axis; dashed lines are pass rate (right axis) and snaps from scrimmage.
The 2026 point on each line is the model's forecast, not an actual.

What changed, and why

Receiver moves from Jerry Jeudy to KC Concepcion (a rookie) and quarterback, running back and tight end stay where they were. The model's scoring forecast moves +4.1 points a game against 2025, with pass rate +0.5 points and snaps +5.2 a game. The forecast delta is the result of those changes; the job changes above are the cause.

The roster moves behind it: KC Concepcion arrives as a rookie at pick 128.

Coordinator, scheme and offensive-line movement are not in this dataset and are not recorded for this team. They are left blank rather than guessed at.

2025 to 2026
Where the forecast moves
Percentage change against last season's actuals.
Bars are the forecast's own movement; the roster changes above are what the model is responding to.

Where the fantasy points go

For 2026 the model grades this offense QB 25th, RB 18th, WR 26th, TE 26th. Its relative strength is running back — 18th, a below-average environment. Its relative weakness is receiver — 26th, a bottom-10 environment. The gap between them — 18th against 26th — is how much the environment should move a close call between two players you rate similarly.

Position environment
Cleveland Browns 2026 grades by position
Bars are inverted league rank, so taller is better. Green is top-10, red is bottom-10.
An environment grade is a thumb on the scale for a close call, not a ranking of the players in it.
Offensive pie against opportunity concentration
Cleveland — small pie, concentrated
Horizontal: how many fantasy points this offense has to give out. Vertical: how tightly its projected points sit on its top two skill players.
Small pie · concentratedLarge pie · concentratedSmall pie · distributedLarge pie · distributedCLE
100% of this offense's projected skill points sit on its top two players, against a league median of 63%. Worth being precise about what this axis does: across 320 historical team-seasons concentration has almost no relationship with how many fantasy starters an offense produces (r = −0.07). The size of the pie decides how many; concentration only decides who.

What the market believes, and whether it is wrong

Every roster in the league is priced twice: once at the market's ranks and once at the model's, both converted to expected fantasy points a game through the empirical price curve — what a player at that rank has actually returned, 2016–2025. Ranks are not linear in value, so summing them would flatter deep rosters and undersell top-heavy ones; points are.

No claim is available here. The market has this roster 15th, the model has it 12th — 3 places apart, inside the 8-place bar. Whatever else is true about this offense, “the market hasn't priced it in” is not a sentence this page has earned, so it is not written.

The biggest individual disagreements on this roster: KC Concepcion (-29), Harold Fannin (-14) and Quinshon Judkins (+1).

What offenses like this one have produced

Take the 2026 forecast — 20.5 points, 57.4% pass rate, 62.8 snaps, 2.9 red-zone trips — and find the 30 most similar offenses among all 320 team-seasons from 2016 to 2025. Closest matches: Miami Dolphins 2021 (20.1 PPG, 2 starters); Denver Broncos 2020 (20.2 PPG, 1 starters); Los Angeles Chargers 2017 (22.2 PPG, 4 starters); Los Angeles Chargers 2023 (20.4 PPG, 1 starters).

Those offenses produced a top-12 quarterback 20% of the time, two top-24 backs 57%, three top-36 receivers 93%, and a top-12 tight end 27%. That is where the starter count below comes from — it is measured off comparable offenses, not asserted.

2.2
expected fantasy starters
Bear1
Base2
Bull3

Read off the 30 most similar offenses in 2016–2025, not asserted. A starter is a QB1, an RB2, a WR3 or a TE1 — top 12, 24, 36 and 12 at the position. Across all 320 team-seasons the average offense produced 2.6.

The player board

No player on this roster clears the bar as a buy. Harold Fannin and KC Concepcion clear it as a fade.

PlayerADPMarketModelEdgePPGRoleRiskCall
Quinshon JudkinsRB52RB23RB23+11276LowFAIR PRICE
Harold FanninTE75TE7TE21-14780LowFADE
KC ConcepcionWR128WR54WR78-2966MediumFADE
Denzel BostonWR158WR62WR13558MediumTHIN MARKET
Dylan SampsonRB164RB55RB77646LowTHIN MARKET
Jerry JeudyWR176WR70WR89665MediumTHIN MARKET

Market and Model are ranks within the position. Edge is the model's position rank against the market's, after removing the drift that affects every player at that price — so it reads as “the model likes him this many places more than it likes the typical player who costs this much.” A call needs the edge to clear the position's bar (QB 7, RB 13, WR 11, TE 5 places), set at two-thirds of that position's own spread.

Model against market
Disagreement, in position places
Positive means the model ranks him higher than his price implies; negative means the market is paying ahead of the model.
Bars are the de-drifted edge — the same number the calls in the table are made from.

The three decisions

NO BUY
Nobody clears the bar
The closest is Quinshon Judkins at +1 position places, short of the threshold. Forcing a buy here would be the template writing, not the model.
FADE
KC Concepcion
KC Concepcion is priced at pick 128 (WR54); the model has him WR78. What fired: the market pays for 29 position places more than the model gives him and a 26th-ranked WR environment behind him. Cutting against it: a market price outside the top 100.

What would make this page wrong

  • The scoring move doesn't happen. The forecast asks this offense for +4.1 points a game against 2025. If it simply repeats last season, the starter count below falls back toward what a 16.4-point offense supports.

The one thing to watch in-season

Watch red-zone trips per game. The forecast has it at 2.9 against 2.2 last season, and it is the input moving furthest from what this offense actually did. If it holds through the first month, the starter count on this page holds with it. If it snaps back, everything downstream of the forecast — the environment grades, the capacity number, the calls — moves with it.

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Sources: Auto Draft Years FF Model workbook — Team Data By Year, Team Stat Ranking, 2026 Team Context; Auto Draft Years 2026 consensus board (16 authoritative market sources); Player outcomes 2016–2025, Pro Football Reference via the project dataset. Team environment grades, forecasts and player model ranks are proprietary. Every figure on this page is generated from the dataset at build time; none is typed in by hand.