The 2025 rookie tight end class already has a headline number: three first-year TEs cleared 100 targets. That is the most in any season since at least 2000.

Tyler Warren (Indianapolis, 114 targets), Colston Loveland (Chicago, 109) and Harold Fannin (Cleveland, 108) each hit historic rookie volume through opposite doors. Two of them are underneath workhorses on the modern Sam LaPorta / Brock Bowers template. The third is a genuine downfield seam target, and by air-yards profile he is the rarest rookie TE season since Kyle Pitts.

Table of Contents

1. The historic bucket
2. Three targets, three job descriptions
3. Warren and Fannin: the underneath template
4. Loveland: the Pitts-shaped rookie
5. What this class actually is

The historic bucket

Since 2000, filtering rookie seasons by players drafted as tight ends, only nine individual 100-target rookie TE seasons exist. Here they are:

2023 was the first year with two. 2025 is the first year with three. That part of the "deepest rookie TE class ever" framing is real. The interesting part is the middle column.

Three targets, three job descriptions

Here is the air-yards distribution of every target the three rookies saw in 2025:

Warren and Fannin lived within five yards of the line of scrimmage. Combined, they were targeted behind the LOS 33 times and got 25 total looks 15+ yards downfield. Loveland was targeted behind the LOS twice all season — and 30 times at 15+, tied with Trey McBride for the most among all tight ends who saw 60+ targets in 2025.

Their average air yards land in different neighborhoods entirely: 5.38 for Warren, 6.04 for Fannin, 9.90 for Loveland. Loveland's 9.90 is the deepest average depth of any TE in the league with 60+ targets in 2025 — ahead of Kincaid (9.33), Zach Ertz (9.11), Hunter Henry (8.27), Pitts (7.36), Travis Kelce (6.81), Trey McBride (6.66), George Kittle (6.70) and Brock Bowers (6.51).

Warren and Fannin: the underneath template

If you squint at Warren's and Fannin's usage, you are looking at LaPorta 2023 (6.95), Kincaid 2023 (6.24) and Bowers 2024 (6.03) with the depth dialed down one more notch. This is the modern move-TE-as-checkdown-hub role, and both rookies did it well by the underlying stat that role is graded on: yards after catch.

Warren finished 2025 with 474 total YAC on 76 receptions (6.24 YAC/rec) — second among all tight ends in the league behind McBride's 583. Fannin put up 352 YAC on 72 catches. In a season where he caught passes from three different Cleveland quarterbacks — Shedeur Sanders (47 targets), Dillon Gabriel (37) and Joe Flacco (24) — he still produced 731 receiving yards and six touchdowns on a 6.04-yard average target depth. Warren, similarly, split his year across Daniel Jones (80 targets), Philip Rivers (20) and Riley Leonard (14) and finished with 817 yards and five scores.

Efficiency-wise, though, these are volume TEs, not efficiency TEs. Warren's 0.138 EPA/target and Fannin's 0.013 EPA/target land underneath every previous rookie TE 100-target season since Pitts (0.239). They generated production; they didn't generate a lot of leverage per touch. That is the LaPorta/Bowers template at a slightly lower rung — LaPorta finished his rookie year at 0.333 EPA/target and Bowers at 0.177, both while running the same underneath route tree.

Loveland: the Pitts-shaped rookie

Loveland is the season's outlier. Since 2010, exactly two drafted rookie tight ends have combined 100+ targets with an average depth of target of 9.0 or higher: Kyle Pitts in 2021 (10.85 aay, 110 targets) and Colston Loveland in 2025 (9.90 aay, 109 targets). Everyone else in the 100-target rookie bucket over that span — Engram, LaPorta, Kincaid, Bowers, Warren, Fannin — ran a shallower route tree.

The comparison to Pitts is the point of the piece, and it goes further than the air-yards line. On throws with 6+ air yards, Loveland averaged +0.540 EPA/target on 71 such targets in 2025. Pitts in 2021 averaged +0.460 EPA/target on 78 such targets. Overall, Loveland finished at +0.457 EPA/target on 109 targets, nearly double Pitts' rookie mark of +0.239. He turned that role into 906 receiving yards and six touchdowns on 70 catches — with essentially all of it coming from Caleb Williams (108 of his 109 targets).

Loveland was not the highest-YAC rookie of the three. His 4.27 YAC/reception is the lowest of the trio. That is a feature of the job, not a bug: 30 of his targets were 15+ yards downfield, and downfield targets don't come with much room to run after the catch. His production came from being trusted to win the ball 10-plus yards past the sticks, and from being efficient enough at it to move Chicago's offense a full expected point every ~2.2 targets.

What this class actually is

The clean way to say what happened in 2025 is this: the rookie TE class produced three 100-target seasons, and two of them (Warren, Fannin) are what the position has already been trending toward — high-volume underneath, YAC-heavy, quarterback-friendly checkdown hubs on the LaPorta / Bowers / Kincaid track. That is the direction the league has been moving with move TEs for two years. Doing it as a rookie is still difficult; three of the last three drafts have produced someone who did.

The one that's actually rare is Loveland. A rookie tight end getting 100 targets while averaging 10 yards downfield has happened exactly twice since 2010, and the previous instance was a No. 4 overall pick. Loveland did it as the No. 10 pick, on a rebuilding offense, catching passes from a second-year quarterback — and, on the per-target math, did it more efficiently than Pitts did.