Mile High Report
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:
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...
