Georgia’s Brock Bowers revives debate over tight ends in the NFL draft

Then again, NFL draft history tells us tight ends don’t tend to return great value when taken in the first round — and that’s with teams having the benefit of knowing what kind of athlete they were getting. NFL front offices won’t have as much information about Bowers as they would like, and at least one known aspect of his draft profile — his stature, listed at 6-foot-3 and 243 pounds — raises questions about how effective he will be as a blocker or end zone target.

On the other hand, the first two-time winner of the John Mackey Award as college football’s top tight end has the pedigree and the production to inspire all sorts of optimism. Film bros and analytics nerds can find common ground in loving Bowers’s tackle-breaking runs, his ability to defeat defenders in different ways and his chart-topping metrics.

So the Georgia star enters the draft as a compelling conundrum: a premium talent at a non-premium position and a chess piece whose versatility could be vexing for play callers lacking the creativity to unlock his skill set.

It’s a problem NFL teams can tell themselves they would love to have, and it probably won’t be long Thursday before Bowers hears his name. One draft analyst, Connor Rogers of NBC Sports, recently had Bowers going to the New York Giants with the sixth pick, though Rogers acknowledged there is “just no arguing against the track record” of underwhelming first-round tight ends.

“I think he’s going to be a hit,” Rogers said of Bowers in a phone interview. “It typically just doesn’t happen in the NFL draft, but there are outliers. There are guys who, with your eyes, you can just see — and the production speaks for itself — he’s going to be a great player. That’s the battle he has to go up against because a lot of people were sold this before.”

Three years ago, NFL fans were told that Kyle Pitts was the next big thing at tight end, and the Falcons showed they agreed by drafting him fourth overall. After topping 1,000 receiving yards as a rookie, though, Pitts has just barely surpassed that threshold in the past two seasons combined. Atlanta took him ahead of wide receiver Ja’Marr Chase, edge rusher Micah Parsons and several other major talents at positions widely deemed more valuable.

“He wasn’t a well-rounded prospect,” Rogers said of Pitts. “He was just kind of a freakishly athletic pass-catching prospect.”

In fairness, Pitts has dealt with injuries, subpar quarterback play and a since-fired coach seemingly uninterested in getting the most out of him, but his disappointing trajectory is similar to those of the past four tight ends drafted in the top 10. That list: T.J. Hockenson (eighth pick, Lions, 2019), Eric Ebron (10th, Lions, 2014), Vernon Davis (sixth, 49ers, 2006) and Kellen Winslow II (sixth, Browns, 2004).

Extending the sample size to include those drafted in the top half of the first round, you still have to go back to 2002 — when Jeremy Shockey was taken 14th overall before becoming a four-time Pro Bowl pick in a Giants uniform — to find a tight end whose selection fully paid off.

Just one tight end taken in the first round after 2003 has made even three Pro Bowls, and Greg Olsen accomplished that only after the Bears, who drafted him, traded him to the Panthers. The other 21 post-Shockey first-rounders have combined for 14 Pro Bowls for their drafting teams.

Meanwhile, the NFL’s top tight ends in recent years have consistently emerged from the later rounds. Since 2017, the only tight ends to earn Associated Press first- or second-team all-pro recognition have been the Patriots’ Rob Gronkowski (second round, 2010), the Chiefs’ Travis Kelce (third round, 2013), the 49ers’ George Kittle (fifth round, 2017), the Ravens’ Mark Andrews (third round, 2018) and the Lions’ Sam LaPorta (second round, 2023).

At no other major positional group have first-rounders had such little impact over the past two-plus decades.

“To be extraordinary (which a first-round pick is expected to be), you practically have to master two positions,” Josh Norris, a football analyst for Underdog, wrote of tight ends in an email exchange last week. “On one play, you might be asked to be the sixth offensive lineman, crashing into a 275-pound defensive end on a down block to carve out a rushing lane. On the next snap, you are the fourth receiver, being asked to win against man coverage or identify and sit in a soft zone seven yards downfield. Those are two wildly different skill sets!”

Pointing to the emergences of Olsen and the Jaguars’ Evan Engram after their original teams decided to move on and to David Njoku’s breakout last year in his seventh season for Cleveland, Norris wrote: “Tight end might be the slowest developing position in the NFL.”

Another issue teams often face in evaluating draft tight end prospects is limited usage in college. Kittle had just 48 receptions over his four years at Iowa, and Kelce did little before his third and final season at Cincinnati. Bowers, by contrast, led Georgia in catches, receiving yards and receiving touchdowns in each of his three seasons while helping the Bulldogs win two national titles and playing at various points with three wide receivers (Ladd McConkey, Adonai Mitchell and Jermaine Burton) also set to get drafted this week.

Among all tight ends from Power Five programs since 2014, according to Pro Football Focus, Bowers ranks first in not only conventional categories such as receiving yards (2,541) and receiving touchdowns (26) but also in advanced metrics such as receiving grade (94.1), receiving yards after contact (689) and missed tackles forced on receptions (44).

“Bowers can be too fast for linebackers,” Norris wrote. “He can be too big and physical for corners or safeties. He is unafraid to work over the middle of the field and make tight window catches with defenders trying to work through his body and into his hands.”

Rogers noted, though, it was a bit “problematic” for NFL teams that the 21-year-old tight end did not provide a recent time in the 40-yard dash, not to mention results in other tests such as the shuttle, the three-cone-drill and the vertical and broad jumps. Bowers was said to have been dealing with a hamstring issue this spring and reportedly performed some tight end drills at a private workout this month attended by a number of NFL assistants and scouts.

Not having certainty about that aspect of Bowers’s profile could be a dilemma for teams that agree with Norris’s assessment that “special athleticism is nearly imperative” for elite tight ends. However, Norris suggested that teams could look at speed measurements taken of Bowers while he was wearing a GPS device in games and that “many evaluators will conclude based on his three years of crazy production — and the film — that Brock Bowers is a special athlete.”

“I know Bowers didn’t test, but he looks like a really good athlete on film,” Rogers said, “with and without the ball. … We don’t need to do a lot of projection for a Brock Bowers.”

Another possible concern for NFL front offices — that tight ends, because their salaries tend to be lower than those of players at premium positions, offer a less valuable discount over the length of a rookie contract — also comes with a glass-half-full side. If Bowers pans out as a key pass-catcher for the team that drafts him, his second contract wouldn’t eat into the salary cap to nearly the degree it would if he were classified as a wide receiver. Both Rogers and Norris compared Bowers to LaPorta, who thrived last season as a rookie for the Lions after they took him just outside the first round at 34th overall.

A couple of decades’ worth of draft history may instill caution in some NFL teams, but a more recent development — defenses taking away the vertical element from opposing passing attacks — could counter that wariness. With offenses increasingly throwing underneath, what better investment than a player who excelled in college at collecting passes near the line of scrimmage and creating yards after the catch?

“The NFL,” Norris wrote, “is at a perfect point to embrace a talent like Brock Bowers.”