Ed Nelson shed his basketball jersey for an NFL Pro Day.

Nelson Improved His Draft Chances

By: Zac Boyer

Posted: 4/24/06

Ed Nelson's path to the NFL may have improved Friday afternoon.

With San Diego tight end coach Rob Chudzinski one of 15 scouts working Nelson out at the Sherman Family Sports Complex and agent Joe Linta running the workout, Nelson went through a series of lifting and running drills to show he's ready to hit the big-time gridiron.

The irony in the workout couldn't have been more promising, with Chudzinski the coach of basketball-to-NFL poster boy Antonio Gates and Linta the agent of Corey Lampkin, who played basketball at Texas A&M Corpus Christi and is now a tight end with the New York Jets.

Still, despite all of the circumstances, Nelson, who hasn't played football since stepping in at tight end during his freshman year at Piper High School in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., knows that he can't look too far into the future after the workout.

"We've got the [NFL] Draft coming up," Nelson said. "If I don't get selected in the later rounds, then I'll just go as a free agent somewhere and go into a mini-camp and take it from there."

"Anybody that's looking for him to come in and be a second tight end or a first tight end this year is way off base," Linta said. "What we're talking about is a guy who is going to come in, work his rear end off in his first year and probably be a practice squad guy. He'll give an amazing effort and then in the second year, as the learning curve hits, will be a contributor."

When Linta first worked Nelson out April 11, he didn't expect much. As the workout progressed, however, Linta began to show more interest in what Nelson could do. By the end, he wanted to make sure Nelson was serious about pursuing football.

"At the end, my point to him was, 'You have to decide. It can't be basketball maybe and football maybe, it has to be animal or vegetable, not both.' And he bought into that," Linta said.

The original plan was to have around three or four local scouts stop by, Linta said, but his expectations were exceeded when 15 scouts showed up, including representatives from the Patriots, Giants and Jets, as well as from the Steelers, Rams, Redskins, Ravens and Colts. Even Nelson's basketball teammates, some of the football team and his father were in attendance for the workout.

Nelson began by joining former Yale quarterback Jeff Mroz, another Linta client, for some lifting for the scouts, the frog leap and getting weighed in and measured. He topped the scales at 264 pounds and measured 6-foot-6 - his football height, as Nelson later joked - and was measured reaching 34 inches on the vertical leap before heading out to the turf for football drills.

Nelson began with two attempts at the coveted 40-yard dash, which scouts had him clocked in at around 4.95 seconds and 5.08 seconds. The times may have been a bit slower, however, considering Nelson was not familiar with the drill.

"The 40 needed a lot of work coming out of the stance," Nelson said. "The 40 is something that takes a lot of practice because those first couple of steps mean the whole world."

He then moved on to a variety of shuttle runs, from the standard back-and-forth short drill, which he registered 4.68 seconds, to the more advanced three-cone drill and the long shuttle. Linta later called the three-cone drill "exemplary" - he ran it in 7.22 seconds, Linta said - despite his lack of familiarity with the task.

"It's my first time going through some of the drills, so I just had to put a lot of effort into it," Nelson said. "It's so hard. The technique and stuff is new to me."

Nelson then ran routes for the scouts while Mroz threw to him, running through a variety of outs and cuts at different distances. He caught all seven passes from 10 yards, then went on to catch seven of the next 11 at up to 30 yards away despite having two of those greatly overthrown.

"I missed a low one or two, but you're not going to catch them all," Nelson said.

He turned a few heads after he was finished catching while Mroz was showing off his distance for scouts. Nelson was out catching Mroz's passes from 50 yards away, then simply threw the balls back to Mroz with little difficulty before heading back to the field for some blocking drills with Chudzinski and the Redskins' scout.

"I love hitting," Nelson said. "I'll do that any day. That's something that doesn't bother me; I don't mind hitting."

The scouts were mostly pleased with Nelson's times, with some pointing out that the short shuttle run was impressive as the time is usually consistent with the 40 time. In Nelson's case, it was much faster.

Linta still knows that the workout was just one step in the right direction for Nelson.

"The guys who have been to the combine have been doing this for three months," Nelson said. "What we're trying to demonstrate today is the catching ability, the heart and the hands."

Linta will continue to work with Nelson on getting stronger and faster, hoping to negotiate a deal with a team shortly after the NFL Draft concludes this coming weekend.

"The problem is, you had the party and everybody came, now hopefully somebody had a good enough time to invite him back," Linta said.