Broncos' Caleb Lohner follows Jimmy Graham's hoops-to-tight end path to Sean Payton
Caleb Lohner was about to realize a lifelong dream when the seed of an entirely different vision was planted.
In 2019, Lohner was visiting the campus of the University of Utah, where the 6-foot-7, 245-pound teenager with a 40-inch vertical leap had just committed to play basketball as a top-100 national recruit. As part of the visit, Lohner was given a tour of the school's football facility, where the team was warming up for a practice. It was there that Lohner met Freddie Whittingham, the tight ends coach who had grown up in the same Provo, Utah, neighborhood as Lohner's father, Matt.
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'They brought him out on the field and I said, 'Hey, I know your dad and your grandpa very well,' ' Whittingham said in a recent phone conversation. 'I said, 'Are you going to play basketball here?' He says, 'Yeah.' I said, 'Well, you should think about playing tight end, too.' I was just kind of looking at him, looking at his body type, and I said, 'You're perfect.' But it was just a joke, right?'
Little did either of them know at the time that the brief conversation would factor into setting Lohner on a path that ended in a phone call last month from Denver Broncos coach Sean Payton. The Broncos, Payton told Lohner, were selecting him with their seventh-round pick, a choice they made despite having only 57 snaps worth of a nascent football career to evaluate.
'I'm so excited,' Lohner said after being drafted, ' … to just continue this process of understanding the game of football.'
In 2020, Lohner flipped his commitment and began his basketball career at BYU, where his father had played in the 1990s. After two seasons, he transferred to Baylor, near his hometown of Dallas, where he settled in as a frontcourt reserve. Lohner called Whittingham following his first season in Waco, Texas. He hadn't been able to shake the idea planted on that practice field in Utah.
'Remember when you told me I should play tight end?' Lohner asked the coach. 'Do you really think I could?'
Whittingham was confident Lohner's athletic traits could transfer to the position. He also had previous experience coaching former Australian rugby player Thomas Yassmin, another tight end on Denver's roster, who arrived in Utah in 2018, having never played organized American football.
'I said, 'Two years would be better than one, and if you want to do it right now, you'd have two years left,' ' Whittingham said. 'But he wanted to see it out with basketball at Baylor, so he stayed for one more year. Then, at the end of that year, we reconnected again and he said, 'I want to do it, for sure.' So, we had a spot and I kind of stood on the table for him. He had to graduate from Baylor. He came here in the summer, went through summer training and then joined us in the fall (of 2024).'
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Whittingham said the physical nature of the position was an easy transition for a player who was used to battling burly forwards for rebounding position. Lohner didn't shy away from the work, often staying after practice to vacuum balls from the JUGS machine. Still, Lohner hadn't played football since junior high, when the play calls were far more basic. Lohner had been on a basketball court in Texas in the spring as the offense was being installed, condensing his window for grasping the playbook.
'One thing with our offense with (former offensive coordinator Andy Ludwig) is that we ran a very pro-style offense,' Whittingham said. 'So it was huddle calls. You watch Jon Gruden on his show, and the calls sound like all the calls he's talking about. It was a big learning curve, and so we decided we'd focus Caleb on the red zone and that he'd be a red zone target for us.'
The Utes went into games with a package of eight to 10 red-zone plays that featured Lohner. He wasn't always a first-read target or even a target at all, lest the offense make its tendencies too easy to decipher. But there were also plays where Utah didn't try to hide the fact that they were going to throw the ball to their 6-7 power forward and let him go get it.
'The box-out fade,' Whittingham called it.
In a November game at Folsom Field in Boulder, just 45 miles from where he'll now practice with the Broncos, Lohner was split out wide to the left as Utah faced a first and goal at the 3-yard line. Colorado cornerback DJ McKinney was lined up in one-on-one coverage, but he was giving up at least five inches and 60 pounds in the matchup. So Lohner did what he'd done during countless games and practices during his four previous seasons as a major-conference college basketball player. He crouched low, forming a steady base, then boxed out his defender. McKinney had no chance.
.@caleblohner posting up for the TD!
📺: FOX#GoUtes pic.twitter.com/wKuGbLLSe7
— Utah Football (@Utah_Football) November 16, 2024
It was the fourth reception of the season for Lohner — all of them touchdowns. He also caught a two-point conversion.
'The unfortunate thing about last season is that our offense was one of the lowest-performing, certainly in the time I've been there,' said Whittingham, who joined the Utah program, coached by his brother Kyle, in 2012. 'The red-zone opportunities, they weren't abundant. I would have loved to have been able to incorporate him more.'
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There wasn't much film to evaluate for the Broncos, but they saw enough fluidity and athleticism in how Lohner moved across those 57 game snaps to be intrigued. They got to know him better when Lohner visited Denver's facility during the pre-draft process, which Lohner called 'one of the best trips I've had.' They were further sold after evaluating him during the Big 12 Conference's pro day in the middle of March, which he attended after wrapping up a fifth and final basketball season at Utah.
'There were just a few plays that you see movement skills, and it's a lot to work with,' Payton said.
When Lohner's second basketball season at Baylor ended last year, he was eager to try football. But head coach Scott Drew and his staff put on a full-court press to keep him in Waco for one more season. Even though he had played only 11 minutes per game across his two seasons at Baylor, he was 'loved as a locker room guy' at the school, Whittingham said. He was offered a 'pretty good chunk of NIL' to stick around for one final season of basketball. The football program at Utah, on the other hand, had a scholarship to offer Lohner, but no NIL deal.
'Part of my job, when he came on his visit, was to convince his uncle, who is kind of his informal agent, that this was worth foregoing that NIL package at Baylor for his fifth year,' Whittingham said. 'My whole recruiting pitch, I had a slide deck comparing Jimmy Graham's path in the NFL and what he did in the NFL to Caleb. They are both 6-7. They could both jump out of the gym. They both played four years of basketball and then played a fifth year of football. I still have that slide deck.'
Graham played four years of basketball at the University of Miami before joining the school's football program for one season in 2009. Graham had 17 catches — five for touchdowns — in 13 games. He was selected by Payton and the New Orleans Saints in the third round of the 2010 draft and went on to make five Pro Bowls in 13 NFL seasons. He caught 55 touchdown passes during his six seasons in New Orleans alone.
'So the fact that Payton calls him on draft day and asks him if he ever heard of someone named Jimmy Graham, it was pretty funny,' Whittingham said. 'We both felt like it was probably meant to be.'
Not that anyone is placing Graham-sized expectations on Lohner, who will get his first taste of NFL football when he takes the field this weekend for Denver's rookie minicamp. Being a seventh-round pick comes with no guarantee of making the 53-man roster, and Lohner will be competing in a room that includes new free-agent acquisition Evan Engram, returning 2024 contributors Adam Trautman, Lucas Krull and Nate Adkins and Yassmin, who spent most of last season on Denver's practice squad.
No matter how the pecking order unfolds, Payton is eager to cultivate the talent of another hooper-turned-tight end.
'If it turns out like the last one did,' Payton said, 'then we'd be really excited.'
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