How to draft the ‘right’ tight end

Despite signing Evan Engram, the Denver Broncos still need to draft a tight end. Here’s how they might want to find the right one.

The Denver Broncos have had limited success at using early or mid-round picks on tight ends. During franchise history the Broncos have drafted 14 tight ends in the first through he fifth rounds:

1. Riley Odoms
2. Clay Brown
3. Keli McGregor
4. Reggie Johnson
5. Jeff Robinson
6. Tony Scheffler
7. Richard Quinn (why, oh why?!?)
8. Julius Thomas
9. Jeff Heuerman
10. Jake Butt
11. Troy Fumagalli
12. Noah Fant
13. Albert Okwuegbunam
14. Greg Dulcich

Of those guys, only Odoms was an All-Pro and only Odoms and Thomas made the Pro Bowl. I would consider Odoms, Scheffler, Thomas and Fant as “successful” picks, but we can debate that in the comments if you wish.

So this raised the titular question: Is there any way to tell if a college tight is going to be successful in the NFL (assuming they stay healthy)?

Generally the evaluation of college players is tripodal, meaning that if you remove any of the three legs (athleticism, college production and tape), the evaluation falls flat. Since tape is so subjective, let’s focus the two objective measures: athleticism and college receiving stats.

One measure of athleticism was developed a few years ago by Kent Lee Platte. It’s called RAS (relative athletic score). This methology uses 10 combine measurements to assess how athletic a player is relative to his positional peers. It assigns them a value for their draft year as well as overall relative to all players who have ever gone through the NFL combine at their position.

For the 2025 draft there is one amazingly athletic tight end – Terrence Ferguson – and three very athletic ones: CJ Dippre, Thomas Fidone II and Jalin Conyers. By All-time RAS for tight ends, Ferguson is 20th. Dippre is 64th. Fidone is 73rd and Conyers is 96th. There have been 1224 TEs who did all of the tests to get a RAS at the combine.

For the 2025 draft there are a number of highly rated TEs who did not complete all of the tests to get a RAS score including Tyler Warren, Colston Loveland, Elijah Arroyo and Mason Taylor.

There have been 62 TEs who has gotten an All-Time RAS of 9.50 or better. They al listed below

Recently many top players have been skipping some tests (or all of the tests) at the combine so they do not show up on this list despite being great athletes. Brock Bowers skipped most of the combine drills in 2024. That being said, many of the great recent tight ends had great RAS scores.

Travis Kelce, George Kittle, Dallas Goedert and Rob Gronkoski all had All-Time RAS scores above 9.50. As did Vernon Davis, Dallas Clark, Jimmy Graham and Kyle Pitts. Of course you can be a very successful NFL TE with a “poor” RAS, but most of those were TEs from a different era:

• Tony Gonzalez All-Time RAS was only 5.05
• Shannon Sharpe’s was 5.10
• Keith Jackson’s was 3.03
• Ben Coates’ was 0.92
• Mark Chmura’s was 1.75

Since we can’t just use RAS (although it is becoming more predictive recently) let’s see if college production can tell us anything when a player either doesn’t have a RAS or has poor one. In general elite (or very good) NFL TEs will have a history of college production.

Since Shannon Sharpe played at the FCS level, his data is not included here. Antonio Gates did not play football in college so he had no (football) production data. But as you can see from the table above, George Kittle only caught 48 passes during his college career. Jimmy Graham only caught 17. Five time Pro Bowl TE, Wesley Walls, only caught 36 passes in college. Former Bronco, Desmond Clark, caught 216 passes in college and never sniffed the Pro Bowl. Ditto for Former Jaguar TE, Pete Mitchell, who caught 190 passes in college at Boston College. Brock Bowers caught 175 passes, but that doesn’t even put him in the top 10 in catches for college TEs. Desmond Clark does not show up on the list below because he was listed as a WR/TE.

Harold Fannin Jr comes in at 10th most catches by a D1 college TE all-time, but most of the guys in the top 10 did not do much in the NFL with the exception of Dennis Pitta.

Chase Coffman was a 3rd round pick of the Bengals and finished his NFL career with 18 catches. Martin Rucker was a 4th round pick of the Browns and finished his NFL career with 2 catches. Jaylen Samuels was converted into a RB/TE in the NFL and finished his NFL career with 136 rushing attempts and 85 catches. Cody Slate, Mickey Peters and Tim Stratton never played in the NFL. Garrett Mills finished his NFL career with 9 catches. Brant Kuithe is in this draft this year/

So we can’t just look at catches. If we use yards per catch in college we find some winners are some losers. Eric Ebron and Coby Fleener both averaged 16.1 yards per catch in college. Ebron was the 10th overall pick but never lived up to his draft slot, although he did make the Pro Bowl once. Fleener was the 34th overall pick and finished his 6 year NFL career with 255 catches. Darius Hill appeared in one NFL game. Isaiah Likely is still in the NFL and having a decent career as Baltimore’s TE2. OJ Howard was the 19th overall pick and ended his NFL career with only 129 catches and no more than 34 in a season. Todd Heap made the Pro Bowl twice. Brycen Hopkins has mostly been a practice squad guy with the Rams. Kyle Pitts is having a nice career so far. Ladarius Green finished his short NFL with 95 total catches. Johnny Harline never played in the NFL, but Gerald Everett who also averaged 14.8 YPC in college has had a nice NFL career so far with 292 career catches.

So how do we evaluate the TEs in the years draft? Well five TEs in this draft are in the top 30 all-time for college receptions: Kuithe, Fannin, Tanner Koziol, Joshua Simon and Tyler Warren.

If we go by receptions per game, Fannin is 6th all-time with 5.0 and Koziol is 14th with 4.5. Bowers, who many consider the best college TE ever, had 4.4 per game. Simon’s 24 college receiving TDs ranks him 8th all-time among college TEs. Kuithe ranks 13th with 22. Darius Hill’s 31 is the most ever for a college TE. The comparative college stats for the TEs in the 2025 draft are shown in the table below.

So who and/or when do you want to get from this draft at TE?