Wrapping up the 'Year of the Tight End'

My freshman year, I was on a co-rec intramural flag football team. We were awful, but we had one play that worked every single time. One of my floor-mates was 6 foot-6. We would have him line up on the offensive line, take 10 steps out and turn around. We'd toss him the ball, and because he was so tall, no one else even had a shot at it.

Fast forward to this NFL season. Snapshot: Rob Gronkowski is 6 foot 6, 265 pounds. His NFL scouting evaluation reads, "Does not have a great top-end speed and may not be able to stretch the field at the next level. Lacks the elusiveness to make people miss after catch."

I bet that guy got fired.

This season has been excellent for the position of the tight end. Traditionally an extra lineman, the revolution began with Tony Gonzalez. A few people are born abnormally strong, some are born abnormally fast and some are born abnormally tall. A very rare player is the one who is all three. Gonzalez became a major receiving threat his first year in the league. Jason Whitten and Antonio Gates have expanded this even further.

And then there's "Gronk." The Patriots' tight end caught 90 passes for 1,327 yards and an NFL record 17 touchdowns. He's not alone. Jimmy Graham for the Saints and Vernon Davis for the 49ers have expanded the role of the position even further. The tight end on an NFL team now is expected to block like a lineman, catch like a wide-out and occasionally (Aaron Hernandez of New England) run the ball like a tailback.

It used to be that a good receiving tight end was a solid check-down option for a rookie quarterback. Now that the position is being spread out wide, even experienced vets like Tom Brady are hitting the ends for huge gains down the field. This has resulted in a total overhaul of the position, and likewise, a new trend in the NFL. Just in the way that the entry of Jonathan Ogden and Anthony Munoz paved the way for millions of potential power forwards to move over to the football team, so will the emergence of the tight end cause an explosion in the number of big, fast athletes. At the NFL level that means that in a few years it will become commonplace.

The trend is expanding to other positions as well. "Play Football the NFL Way," a book that's been on my shelf for many years, describes the prototypical wide receiver as 5-foot-10 to 6-foot-1, 170-190 pounds. It also mentions that height is "not a requirement to play wide out, instead speed is the deciding factor." In today's NFL, that couldn't be further from the truth. Look at Megatron: Calvin Johnson is 6-foot-5. Dez Bryant and Julio Jones are both around 6-foot-2 and run sub 4.5 40–yard dash times. These "true" wide-outs are becoming more and more the norm in the NFL, as throwing up a jump ball becomes a more and more attractive option for a quarterback looking to move the ball against a tough defense.

On the opposite side, there are the exceptions. Possession receivers (think Wes Welker) are getting smaller and quicker. Running short routes in the middle of the field is a punishing endeavor, but the 185 pound Welker is becoming the new standard in the short range phase of the game.

Defensive backs are also getting bigger to compensate for the massive receivers. Every member of the Giants secondary that started the Super Bowl was more than 6–feet tall. The Pats, by comparison, had 5-foot-10 Kyle Arrington, 5-foot-11 Kyle Chung, 5-foot-10 Sterling Moore and 5-foot-10 Julian Edelman.

All told, the trend toward bigger, faster players in this season was a defining characteristic of the league. Who knows what new trend will emerge next year? (I'm hoping Russell Wilson and the 5-foot-10 quarterback!)