The Los Angeles Rams kept pushing at tight end on Friday, using the 61st overall pick in Round 2 of the 2026 NFL Draft on Max Klare out of Ohio State. The selection came after years of trying to build real depth at one of the league’s most important mismatch positions.
Klare arrives with a reputation that has made him the runner-up rookie tight end prospect on many draft boards, and he lands in a room that already includes Tyler Higbee, Colby Parkinson, Terrance Ferguson, Davis Allen and Mark Redman. For the Rams, the pick is less a surprise than the latest step in a pattern that has stretched across multiple drafts.
That pattern has been hard to miss. The Rams failed to land Dalton Kincaid in 2023 and Brock Bowers in 2024, then used the 2025 draft on Ferguson before taking Klare this year. Each move has pointed to the same conclusion: the team has not been satisfied with the way the position has settled and keeps spending premium draft capital to fix it.
The urgency is easy to explain. Higbee is still struggling to recover fully from his ACL injury, Parkinson is a free agent after this season and Ferguson has not yet given the Rams the kind of production they need from a young pass catcher. Ferguson caught only 44 percent of his targets in the regular season, and that number fell to 16 percent in the playoffs, leaving the team with even more reason to keep adding options.
Klare does not join a bare room, though. He enters a group that already gives the Rams multiple bodies to sort through, and that is the real clue to how the team views the position. The roster composition suggests the Rams are committed to running 13-personnel packages and are building toward a more layered tight end rotation rather than waiting for one player to solve everything.
That approach comes with a tradeoff. The more the Rams invest in the position, the clearer it becomes that they are still searching for the right combination, not simply collecting depth for its own sake. Klare may be the latest answer, but he also underscores how long the search has gone on and how much the Rams are still asking from the position in 2026.
