Penn State tight end Tyler Warren has long been a commodity for the Nittany Lion offense, a staple in a tight end room that has not been short on current or hopeful NFL talent.
But what most people don’t remember — or maybe don’t know — is that Warren came to Penn State with no real tight end experience on a tail end of a high school career that was spent throwing the football. Warren was a quarterback, once verbally committed to Virginia Tech before making the switch to Penn State and the switch to tight end on top of that. Talk about a lot of change.
“Me coming in as a quarterback, I felt like I was a physical runner in high school, but I guess I didn’t really understand the true physicality of being on a line of scrimmage in college football and that’s definitely something that I had to develop the willingness and the toughness,” Warren told StateCollege.com “I’m really just gonna head-butt dudes sometimes and just stick your head in there. I think watching Brenton Strange, I see him as a good blocker and the way he does it the right way. So I just tried to mold and look like him and put my own twist on it but I think really it is it is something you have to be willing to do it. I think especially the way we use our tight ends here at Penn State you can’t really just be a one-dimensional guy; you’re gonna have to do both to be successful here.”
Warren has, of course, molded into a solid tight end in his own right, a far cry from the quarterback his once was. Now Warren is hard to bring down, capable with his hands and a reliable target all around the field. But as you might imagine, changing positions comes with a degree of doubt and days you spend wondering if you’ve made the right decisions.
“For me it really was probably most of that first year I got here,” Warren recalled. “I did some good things in the pass game, but really in the run game there weren’t too many bright spots. And you know, I was thinking sometimes like, ‘did I make the right decision?’ I truly credit to my teammates in that tight end room when I first got here instilling confidence in me and then my understanding that they’ve been there themselves. Some journeys are different, but trusting them and just following the process. It takes time. Some people will come in ready to go. Some people might take a year or two years before they’re ready to go. But it definitely wasn’t as easy a transition as I thought it might have been.”
In many ways, Warren is an interesting product of the tight ends that have come before him. He is physical, an ever-improving blocker and a consistent part of the passing game. He’s a little bit of what made Brenton Strange so good, what Theo Johnson did well and bits and pieces of what has made Pat Freiermuth a staple in the Pittsburgh Steelers’ offense. Of course, Tyler Warren is Tyler Warren, but when you get to grow around a bunch of solid players, you pick things up in the process.
“Brenton, he’s an all around guy but something that really sticks out when you watch him is his his effort and his toughness in the run game,” Warren said. “And running with the ball, when he runs with the ball he’s not going down with the first tackler. So I think that’s something I’ve tried to develop. And then Theo, he can run a route as good as any player on the field, not just tight ends. And watching Pat who was another red zone guy that when he was here. So like you said, I’m me and they’re them, but it’s definitely a great group fo guys to learn from and pick up things like that.”
Back to the present, Warren is looking to continue to develop into an even better version of the player he has become today. Over the span of his career, Warren has turned into a reliable red zone threat, 10 of his 11 career touchdown receptions coming from inside the opponents’ 20. In fact, of the four tight ends mentioned in this story, 40 of their 50 collective touchdowns have come within the red zone, Freiermuth leading the way with 13 such catches.
And the key to being a good red zone threat? Well it takes a few things, but the first is having strong hands, and that’s where Warren’s background in baseball and basketball comes into play.
“I think part of it’s just a natural thing or a hand-eye coordination thing,” Warren said. “And then it really just comes with repetitions and getting on the jugs and making sure you’re with [quarterbacks] Beau [Pribula] and Drew [Allar] as much as you can and catching passes like that. But yeah, both baseball with specifically hand-eye is a big deal. Hitting the baseball isn’t as easy as it may seem sometimes, and I think definitely basketball, going up for rebounds and catching values and stuff like that definitely just plays a part. It’s just something I’ve been doing my whole life.”
For some, being boxed in as a certain type of player might come across as something other than a compliment. Not for Warren though. He takes pride in the player he has become and the skillset he has developed to help the Nittany Lions punch it in for six points. Not to mention if you averaged one touchdown every 4.5 catches, you wouldn’t be complaining about what people called you.
Red zone threat? Sure. More like touchdown machine, and a big part of the reason why Penn State ended 76.56% of its red zone trips with a touchdown, the sixth-best rate in the nation. Only three teams — Kansas State, Oregon and Georgia — scored more red zone touchdowns than Penn State in 2023.
“I definitely don’t take it as a as an insult,” Warren said. “I think it’s really just kind of what tight ends can excel at. At certain times with our body size and our matchups that we usually will have, whether it’s a linebacker or a safety, it’s usually somebody you will have some type of advantage on. Whether it’s [speed or strength], there’s always going to be something that we can use in our favor. I think that just kind of speaks to the position and the way the way it’s used.”
Plus there’s the other — harder — option: Warren running for 75-yards against Ole Miss in the Peach Bowl, only to be caught from behind a few yards short of the goal.
“I hadn’t really had a long run like that since high school,” Warren said with a laugh. “Like once I caught the ball, you turn and start running and I just kind of saw that no one was in front of me. Oh, man, like I might be running for a little bit here … I was gonna try and cut it back and then he caught me but yeah, I was in that point, you know, I was a little tired.”
