Troy Franklin is heading toward the new season with less momentum than he had a year ago, and that is the strange part. The Denver Broncos receiver said on Thursday that he wants a 1,000-yard season, about 80 or 100 catches and a doubled touchdown total, even as one offseason view has him projected as no better than the fifth option in the room.
That mismatch is why Franklin is being searched now. The Broncos are opening the regular season against the Kansas City Chiefs on Monday Night Football, and the questions around their receiver rotation have sharpened after talk of a trade for Jaylen Waddle and strong training camp showings from Pat Bryant and Marvin Mims Jr. Franklin, a 2024 fourth-round pick, is the one wideout in that group no one seems to be talking about.
Lou Scataglia put Franklin on his list of Broncos on the hot seat in 2026 and wrote on September 8 that he had fallen out of favor a bit this offseason. He said it was not unrealistic to think Franklin was, at best, the fifth option behind Courtland Sutton, Waddle, Bryant and Marvin Mims Jr., and that he was already listed behind Sutton, Waddle and Mims on the current depth chart. That is a hard landing for a player who just finished a 2025 season with 65 receptions for 709 yards and six touchdowns.
The numbers from that second season still look useful. Franklin had 28 catches for 263 yards and one touchdown as a rookie, then took a real step forward in 2025. But the end of the year gave the Broncos reasons to pull back. He had only four receptions for 17 yards and no touchdowns in the final four games, and he did not play against the Patriots because of a hamstring injury. He and Courtland Sutton also finished tied for second in the NFL with eight dropped passes each, a reminder that production and reliability are not always the same thing.
Scataglia also pointed to the limits in Franklin’s game, writing that he did not necessarily excel at anything and was not a consistent separator last year. That is the friction inside the story: Franklin has enough box-score production to ask for a bigger role, but enough late-season uncertainty to make a smaller one plausible. He told The Denver Post on Thursday that he is going to get a 1,000-yard season, double up the touchdowns and needs about 80 or 100 receptions. Those are the goals of a receiver expecting a larger share of the offense, not someone settling into a backup lane.
That is what makes the opener matter. If Franklin is truly the fifth option, his path to those numbers gets narrow fast, because the Broncos are already shaping their passing game around a deeper receiver group. If he is going to climb back into the conversation, it has to start when the Broncos face the Chiefs on Monday Night Football. Until then, Franklin’s season reads like a player trying to turn one strong year into a stable place before the snaps get assigned for real.
