ATHENS, Ga. — In the old days, or even now in a room with less forward-thinking, the coaches at Georgia might be stumped when they looked at their depth chart at tight end. Can we trade one of these guys for a receiver? How can we justify hoarding talent at this position, where we can’t play them all, can’t get them all the ball, and can’t keep them happy?
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That’s one way to look at it. The wrong way.
Here’s how Georgia’s coaches should be, and probably are, looking at it: It’s very possible they will have two, if not three, of the best receivers in the SEC this season. They just happen to be tight ends. That’s not a puzzle. That’s a massive opportunity to exploit a market weakness that has emerged in college football and give Georgia one of the most intriguing offenses in the country in 2022.
“In the NFL and college game, that’s the biggest X-factor position,” said Chris Doering, the former Florida and NFL receiver and now an SEC Network analyst. “When you can have a guy that can (block), and then can become the pass receiver where you can have him attached, you can split him out wide, I don’t know if there’s anything that creates more of a mismatch advantage to have one of those guys.”
And Georgia has three of those guys. Maybe four, as anyone who watched Georgia’s spring game on Saturday could see.
There was Arik Gilbert, the one-time freshman phenom at LSU who, after a year away, looked uncoverable. There was also Oscar Delp, a true freshman who looked like someone who on any other team might be starting right away. But this team also has Brock Bowers, the SEC Freshman of the Year last year, and former five-star Darnell Washington, both of whom missed spring practice with injuries.
How loaded is Georgia’s tight end from? There have been 11 tight ends over the past three years ranked among the top 150 overall recruits in their respective class, per the 247Sports Composite. Three of them now play for Georgia: Gilbert (fifth overall) in 2020, Bowers (105th in 2021) and Delp (105th in 2022). And that doesn’t include Washington, who was listed as an athlete in the 2020 class, where he was the No. 23 overall prospect.
There’s a reason Todd Hartley, the tight ends coach for Georgia, has probably been underpaid at a mere $450,000 per year, and has a raise coming.
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There’s also a reason Todd Monken, the offensive coordinator who also has a new deal coming, is known for dynamic thinking. It was a little over a year ago, when someone asked him about getting Washington more involved, that he offered a hint of what was to come: “You’re hopeful we have enough skill players that they have to defend the whole field, and all the players on the field are capable of making plays, which is a sign of a really good offense. The best offenses have that in terms of weapons, tight ends, wideouts and running backs, which gives you the opportunity to take advantage of mismatches and make them defend the field.”
Monken’s offense has already been making liberal use of the tight ends: The Bulldogs had at least two tight ends on the field 51.7% of the time last season, the highest rate in the SEC and eighth-highest nationally. Of those plays — 492 in all — 85 of them were with three tight ends on the field, which was also the most in the SEC, and fifth-most in the nation.
Bowers led the way in those snaps (661), on the way to his national breakout season. John FitzPatrick, who has since left for the NFL, got the second-most (588) followed by Washington (328, despite missing the first four games after a preseason foot injury.)
This year you could see even more three-tight end sets, with Washington’s snaps increasing and Gilbert getting a very large share, too. (This all assumes health and no transfer portal-ing, always a necessary asterisk in this day and age.)
The main question then would be targets and catches: Are there enough to keep everyone happy? Could Georgia’s tight ends end up being the equal to the wide receivers?
That was the question put to quarterback Stetson Bennett, the man set to be making most of those throws.
“There will be some stories about that, and some traps for some of the players to read into and start thinking we’re not getting the ball (to them) enough,” Bennett said. “But again, everybody on the field can get the ball at any time. That’s how I grew up playing football. I didn’t grow up like some other people, I threw it to whoever was open. I think we’ve got an awesome group of guys around us who only care about winning. Obviously, they want a catch and they’re all good enough to break the game open. But they care about winning, and if that means one game (wide receiver) AD (Mitchell) catches 10 balls for 160 yards, and tight ends don’t catch anything, or vice versa, then so be it. All we really care about is winning.”
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All true. But when it comes to winning — and putting up the points necessary to do so — Georgia’s best strategy may be to use those tight ends in ways that few if ever have done before. In the passing revolution that overtook college football, defenses got smaller in order to keep up. This could be Georgia’s answer to that, evolving to exploit a market deficiency in the game. The kind of defenders that can match up with Bowers, Gilbert and Washington, well, few opponents have them, and the ones that do don’t tend to have more than one.
“They’ve always talked about the tight end being the quarterback’s safety blanket,” Doering said. “But it’s almost become the place where you can get the most bang for your buck when you have an athlete that has the natural size, but has the ability to run routes, and separate, and jump the way those guys do now in the red zone. … Maybe outside of having a running quarterback, I think it puts the most pressure on a defense that you can possibly put.”
Doering remembered Marcus Pollard, who was a teammate of his with the Indianapolis Colts who played in the NFL for 14 years despite never playing college football. The New England Patriots won Super Bowls with both Rob Gronkowski and Aaron Hernandez on the field creating mismatches. But for whatever reason, the proliferation of those athletic tight ends hasn’t happened. But it could still happen, with Georgia ground zero for that.
Actually, it’s surprising this hasn’t happened on a wider scale sooner in college football. Tony Gonzalez was among the first basketball players — he was a power forward at Cal — whose skills translated into stardom as an NFL tight end. There are a ton of Gonzalez-type athletes in college basketball who are tweeners in that sport — too small for power forward — who as a football tight end would have both the size and athleticism to be dominant.
But do you need a certain amount of speed on offense, more than one guy in order to open up that space and those passing lanes for the bigger guys? Perhaps, but Doering estimated that the majority of passes he caught at Florida were out of the slot, playing off Ike Hilliard and Reidel Anthony on the outside.
“You do need to have some complements, but I don’t think it needs to be a speed guy,” Doering said. “I know you’d love to have someone like (former Alabama wide receiver) Jameson Williams that takes the top off the defense and gets the secondary’s attention. But I think you can get the same mismatch with tight ends. You can split a couple tight ends out wide, and another in the slot: Where do you try to help out?
“It’s about where are you going to get the safety’s attention because they feel like there could be an advantage. What you may not be able to create with speed you could create with mismatches.”
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Georgia’s tight ends are also different enough that they complement each other:
Bowers (6-4, 230) is the smaller, stockier and more athletic guy. Washington (6-7, 265) is the massive target. Gilbert (6-5, 240) is a bit of a blend of the two. Delp (6-5, 225) is a bit skinner but more athletic. In fact, we can probably ditch the traditional labels on these guys: They will be tight ends on the roster, but in reality are a hybrid of tight end, receiver, H-back, and fullback, the role depending on the play.
“We have to kind of redefine what tight end means, what tight end looks like,” Doering said. “I do think it’s going to kind of change the position and what we think of the position, what’s possible for the position.”
It’s not unheard of for teams to have and play two elite tight ends: Iowa in 2018 had two tight ends key its passing game and they were both selected in the first round of the 2019 NFL Draft (T.J. Hockenson and Noah Fant).
Georgia has also seen it work against them: Two years ago Florida tight ends Kyle Pitts, Keon Zipperer and Kemore Gamble combined to gash the Bulldogs for 149 yards and two touchdowns.
The sport has been nibbling at the edges of a tight end-offensive revolution. Georgia could push it further this season, simply by playing to its strengths. This team doesn’t just have tight end depth. It has tight end star power.
(Top photo of Arik Gilbert: Tony Walsh / UGA Athletics)
