Tight End · Cleveland Browns
Carsen Ryan
No. 48 · Rookie
The number came on a hard day, and his mother said it felt like a sign from heaven.
Carsen Ryan grew up in Orem, Utah, in a family that had been doing football for a long time before he ever put on pads.
His father, Chas, was a linebacker at William Penn University in Iowa. Records he set there for sacks and tackles for loss still stand. Chas Ryan played the day Carsen was born. On his mother's side, grandfather Steve Downey spent 42 years as a high school football coach and athletic director. That's two generations of people who gave their working lives to this game, and Carsen grew up inside all of it.
He attended Timpview High School in Orem, then transferred to American Fork for his senior year. He broke his leg early that season. Two games played. Then a signed letter to UCLA as a four-star recruit, arriving as a recruited tight end — and getting listed as a running back once he got there.
That's a small thing that says something real. You spend years building toward a position, you show up, and the depth chart has you somewhere else. After the 2023 season, Ryan entered the transfer portal. He moved to Utah. Then to BYU. Three Power Five schools across four college years, one position change along the way, and somewhere in that stretch he settled in as a tight end.
At BYU, Ryan was assigned jersey No. 20. The number hadn't been handed to him arbitrarily. His mother, Dani, had worn it herself. When Ryan texted her a photo of the jersey, her father — Ryan's grandfather Steve Downey, the retired coach and athletic director Ryan has called his hero, the person he has said he most wants to grow up to be like — was fighting cancer.
Dani said the photo arrived on a day she was struggling. She said it came like a sign from heaven that everything would be alright.
That's the whole thing about a number. It's fabric and print, and then sometimes it's everything else at once.
Steve Downey was at LaVell Edwards Stadium for Ryan's first game as a Cougar. The man Ryan said he wanted to become — 42 years on the sideline, decades of other people's kids — was in the stands to watch his grandson play.
The Cleveland Browns took Ryan 248th overall in the 2026 NFL Draft. Last pick territory. The kind of number that doesn't come with guarantees.
But the Ryan family has been around football long enough to know what the long way looks like. Chas Ryan coached at Snow College, where one of his players was Garett Bolles, who went on to play for the Denver Broncos. Steve Downey spent four decades building programs. Carsen went to three schools, changed positions, broke his leg before his senior season even got started, and still made it to a draft weekend.
No. 20 is now his.
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