Crossover Athlete Rico Gathers has a pro-bowl ceiling as a tight-end

With a tight-end class that is relatively weak on athleticism, Rico Gathers has become an intriguing prospect.  Still, according to two media sources, Gather's last experience on the grid-iron was in middle school at the tender age of 13.  With so little football background, he's a developmental 7th round pick at best, though some team is surely going to give him a chance as an undrafted free agent.

With no football data on Gathers to draw from, we can only perform some comparisons of raw athleticism to similar recruits with more basketball experience than football.  This is the beauty of using a simple model to project tight-end pro-bowl (PB) status, one that predicted both Tyler Eifert and Travis Kelce as Pro-bowlers.  This model based on size adjusted combine scores suggests that Gathers does possess the raw athleticism indicative of a pro-bowl caliber tight end:

Name	Hgt	Wgt	Dash	Vert	High-Pt	Avg_P	P(PB)
Jimmy Graham	78	260	4.53	38.5	116.5	57.40	55.6%
Rico Gathers	78	273	4.75	34.5	112.5	57.47	32.1%
Jordan Cameron	77	254	4.53	37.5	114.5	56.07	27.1%

All of Gather's numbers are from his recent pro-day, with the exception of his vertical, which was a number taken from a 2015 report.  I pulled combine numbers for Graham and Cameron to serve as a reference as they too played a limited roles on their respective college teams (Miami and USC) after playing multiple years of basketball, an option Gathers might consider if he goes undrafted this week.  If you fail to adjust for weight, Gathers looks bad against the 4.53 and 37+ inch verticals of Graham and Cameron.  However, the additional 13-19 pounds that he carries suggest that averaged more momentum over the course of his 40 yard dash than either Graham or Cameron did.  This suggest that once Gathers gets going, he's going to be harder to stop that either of these basketball playing counterparts.