2024 NFL Scouting Combine Cheat Sheet: Tight End

These are the players who analysts expect to see perform best in the athletic testing portion of the workout:

Brock Bowers (Georgia) – One quick breeze through Bowers’ highlights with the Bulldogs and you can see that he’s a phenomenal athlete. He’s explosive. He’s fluid. He’s outstanding in space. He can separate. He’ll hurdle defenders with the ball in his hands. In the spring of 2022, after Bowers’ first year on campus, I asked then-Georgia linebacker Channing Tindall about him at the Combine and he told me that when Bowers first got to campus, he volunteered to run gassers alongside Tindall and a couple of his teammates on defense. They looked at him and thought, ‘Yeah, OK rookie, let’s see what you’ve got,” and he proceeded to beat them on two straight laps across the field. The day after Tindall told me that story, he went out and ran a laser-timed 4.47 40-yard dash. In Bruce Feldman’s annual Freaks List article highlighting the top athletes in college football, a Georgia staffer told him that Bowers would be in the 4.50 range in the 40 … my feeling is that he could be faster on that based off that intel from Tindall.

Ja’Tavion Sanders (Texas) – Like Bowers, it doesn’t take long after watching Sanders on the football field to think this guy is a top-end NFL athlete. He has speed to stretch the field vertically, and Head Coach Steve Sarkisian and his staff did an outstanding job of using that speed to their advantage over the last couple of years, as the junior tight end was often targeted down the field. Despite that, Sanders did not drop a single pass this season for the playoff-bound Horns. He’s a mismatch nightmare in the pass game, and that athleticism should shine through in Indianapolis.

Jaheim Bell (Florida State) – If Bell had come out of college a few years ago, he likely would have been viewed as a mismatch fullback as opposed to being a tight end. Listed at just under 6-foot-2 and 245 pounds, he’s an undersized player for the position, but he has mismatch qualities to his game. Both at FSU and previously at South Carolina, Bell was used out wide, in the slot, and even in the backfield where he both ran routes and took handoffs between the tackles. You don’t often see tight ends get the ball on jet sweeps, but Bell did just that in his career. He is a dynamic athlete at the position, and should test very well in the athletic portion of the workout.

Jared Wiley (TCU) – Wiley has explosive traits….