Packers' home game vs. Carolina set for Saturday night kickoff on Dec. 19
the first sign Tonyan was not destined to play quarterback. “It was kind of demoralizing,” Tonyan says of the revelation his future in the game was with a different position. Tonyan loved being a quarterback. The position didn’t love him back.
By his sophomore season at Indiana State, Tonyan had done everything he could to stay behind center. He wanted to play at Marian Central Catholic, a private high school known for its football tradition. College recruiters didn’t have a hard time finding Marian Central. It’s the same school former Packers right tackle Bryan Bulaga attended. They just wouldn’t have seen Tonyan much.
In a 10-year period, Marian Central produced four Division I quarterbacks. Tonyan expected to join the lineage. On the first day of summer workouts after his freshman season, Tonyan took snaps.
On the second day, a freshman named Chris Streveler joined.
“I remember this day like it was yesterday,” Tammy Tonyan, Robert’s mother, says. “This tall kid walks in. Already got hair under his arms. He’s big, like 6foot. Robert is 5-8, kind of skinny, gangly. Sure enough, (Streveler) was good. Robert was good too, but this guy was bigger, stronger, more athletic.”
Streveler is now a backup quarterback with the Arizona Cardinals, behind Kyler Murray.
Tonyan, meanwhile, was a late bloomer. At 14, he still had a squeaky voice. “He was a senior in high school, maybe even a freshman in college,” his mother says, “before he got hair under his armpits.” Today, Tonyan stands 6-5. He’s gained 25, almost 30 pounds since joining the Packers three years ago, his mother says. When he returns home, he towers over his childhood friends.
Back then, Tonyan was the smallest kid in his neighborhood. He was also the most athletic. Tonyan started riding a bicycle without training wheels when he was 3. That year, Tammy remembers, her husband, Bob, got home from work, where he owned a construction company. Bob kicked a football so high, it cleared a 100-year-old oak tree. The other neighborhood kids, children bigger than her son, scattered away from the football as it descended.
Tonyan stood under with his chest.
He never struggled to catch. Tonyan just preferred to throw. When his door closed at Marian Central, Tonyan decided to attend McHenry, his local public school. Unlike Marian Central, which was just a 10-mile drive west, McHenry was not a hotbed for college recruiting. The team finished 1-8 in Tonyan’s junior season. It improved to 4-5 his senior year. Tonyan often would be the most athletic player on the field, but there was nothing graceful about his passing. He completed fewer than 60% of his throws.
“He was the kind of kid,” Tammy says, “that would flip over somebody to score.”
Before his son’s senior season, Bob Tonyan printed a list of every Division I school in the country. Tammy Tonyan emailed the head coach, quarterbacks coach and recruiting coordinator at each school, usually five or six schools each night, posing as her son. She referenced her son’s online highlight reel and asked for an email back if there was interest.
“Sometimes I’d go wake up in the
it, catching
it morning and there’d be a message,” Tammy says, “A lot of times there wasn’t.” Robert was responsible for corresponding with any program that showed interest.
They were left with a collection of small-college camps. Ball State. Western Michigan. Bowling Green. Tammy scheduled the camps in her calendar, sometimes two in a weekend. If they could attend one on Friday, they’d visit another on Sunday.
One by one, each passed. “Every time we went to one, we got a little feedback” Tammy says. “Some of them seemed really serious, but they never called us back.”
Until Indiana State — a school known for Larry Bird, not football — extended a scholarship.
Now Sanford was watching Tonyan warm up on the sideline, and with each toss it was clear this redshirt freshman was not his future quarterback.
Something else was also clear: Tonyan was the most talented player on the team.
“Sometimes when they’re kind of messing around on the field and throwing balls you see these guys making catches,” Sanford says. “There were several times when I saw him make these very athletic catches as a quarterback. And I said, ‘Rob, have you ever thought about playing receiver?’ ”
The crushing disappointment lasted only a moment. No longer than 30 seconds. For the first time, Tonyan questioned himself.
Then, anticlimactically, he moved on. “What I mean by demoralizing,” he says, “in that split second you have that, ‘Am I good enough? Do I go play quarterback somewhere else to prove a point?’ Then I was like, ‘Wait, I can go and be good at something else.’ ”
Quarterback wasn’t the only thing Tonyan wanted. As a kid, he dreamed of playing in the NFL. By elementary school, Tonyan could list every team in the league from memory. Even as he shuttled around the Midwest, visiting football doormat after football doormat, that belief never faded. No matter how unlikely, Tonyan would tell his parents of his NFL plans. Tammy, a self-ascribed eternal optimist, never doubted her son.
When Tonyan’s path to quarterback closed, another door opened. Tonyan was surprised how much he enjoyed playing receiver. There was a freedom he’d never felt. Now he could let his unbridled athleticism overwhelm opponents.
“Once I got on the field and started running routes I was like, ‘This is way cooler,’ ” Tonyan says. “With a quarterback, you have to be on point every second of the day. Study habits and all that is just so different. You can’t really be yourself, or your personality, all of the time because you have to be so professional. It was kind of a relief of stress. I could go out and be myself, and express myself on the field the way I wanted, rather than being stuck behind center.”
Finally free, Tonyan hit a level he’d never knew existed. He was too big, too athletic, too good for an FCS field. His dominance went beyond the numbers. At 6-5, Tonyan towered over defensive backs. He was always fast, the burst he showed as a quarterback now unleashed at receiver. In his earliest practices, Tonyan showed a natural ability to run routes.
“He could naturally run and change directions,” former position coach Kriss Proctor says, “which a lot of bigger guys can’t naturally do. He can run and naturally sink his hips. He’s got really good ankle flexibility and knee flexibility and hip flexibility, and because he’s so flexible and athletic, he had no problem learning how to run full speed and drop his hips and change direction.
“He’s just very, very natural. Everything he does, except maybe play quarterback,
GREEN BAY - The Green Bay Packers were given a sixth prime-time game when the NFL announced Tuesday that their Lambeau Field matchup with the Carolina Panthers will be played at 7:15 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 19.
The NFL had left the date and time of 10 Week 15 and 16 games open, so it would have some flexibility in deciding its normal slate of Saturday games late in the regular season.
The league chose Carolina at Green Bay and Buffalo at Denver over three other Week 15 matchups for which it had held back the dates and times: Houston at Indianapolis, New York Jets at Los Angeles Rams and Detroit at Tennessee. The Bills and Broncos will play the early game Saturday (3:30 p.m. kickoff).
Both Saturday games will be shown on NFL Network, and the Packers announced their game also would be televised in Green Bay and Milwaukee on Fox. Though the game will be shown in prime time, it doesn’t qualify as one of the five a team is limited to during the regular season. was very natural.”
Then there were those hands. Every ball, no matter how imperfect the pass, stuck in his gloves. In one of his first practices, Proctor remembers, Tonyan leaped for a pass that was sailing over his head. It was almost past him, but Tonyan stuck out those hands, plucking the back half of the football over his shoulder. “It was a catch you’d see from an NFL Hall of Famer,” Proctor says. “That’s when it hit me this guy has a chance.”
Perish remembers a catch from Tonyan’s first season as a receiver. At Western Illinois, he scrambled and lobbed the football 50 yards downfield into triple coverage. Tonyan jumped over two defenders, had the third hanging on his back, but caught the football anyway. Later that season, Tonyan ran a seam route down the middle against South Dakota State’s zone coverage. “He really wasn’t the read,” Perish says, “but I just knew if I threw it high to him, he’d come up and get it.” Tonyan scaled a linebacker and made a one-handed catch as a safety hit him in the back.
He was still rail thin, a late developer growing into his body, but Tonyan’s height was rare for a receiver. Indiana State would line up Tonyan inside and lob him jump balls. In a game at Minnesota as a senior, Tonyan caught three of those jump balls in the end zone. It was the last time Tonyan scored three touchdowns in a game before his eruption on “Monday Night Football.”
It didn’t take Sanford long to know Tonyan’s future was at a tight end. His height, speed, fluidity — and those hands — made the archetype NFL teams coveted. There was just one problem.
Tonyan had never blocked before.
The “team dinners” were epic. Two, three nights a week, a small group of NFL hopefuls made a grocery store run, loading up on bone-in steaks, pork chops, salmon, a garden variety of vegetables. Then they packed trainer Chris Leathers’ kitchen.
For Tonyan, these “team dinners”
had a name: 250-poundgate. “Like when you put ‘gate’ on the end of something important,” Leathers says. Tonyan was on a mission. He made the transition from throwing footballs to catching them, but his metamorphosis was incomplete. Desperate to add weight, Tonyan did everything he could. For a time, Tammy Tonyan stuffed chocolate, peanut butter, caramel, coconut and all kinds of sweets into 850-calorie plastic bags, the most fattening snack she could create. But the team dinners, that’s where Tonyan really packed the pounds.
“We tried to stick with really lean meats,” Leathers says. “Anything high in protein, he ate a lot of it.”
Their mission to convert Tonyan into an NFL tight end wasn’t confined to the kitchen. For five summer days each week, Tonyan joined other NFL prospects at Leathers’ gym. The group included Streveler, who threw passes as Tonyan ran the route tree. That was the easy part. “Rob’s receiving talent is awesome,” Leathers says. But an NFL tight end does more than run and catch. Tonyan needed more bulk.
So he grabbed the weights. Deadlifts. Squats. Tonyan stuck to the basics, Leathers says. They focused on building a stronger core. “We did not want to put beach-body muscles on Robert,” Leathers explains. “We needed him to be functionally strong.” On the field, Tonyan paired with former Iowa tight end C.J. Fiedorowicz, who played for the Houston Texans at the time. Before concussions prematurely ended his career, Fiedorowicz was one of the fiercest blocking tight ends in the league.
Tonyan and Fiedorowicz did blocking drills without pads. They were teaching periods, but they could become brutal. Fiedorowicz, at 265 pounds, was in another weight class.
“They just went
Leathers says.
These were long days on the field, in the gym. Nobody worked harder than Tonyan. At Indiana State, receivers had a “no loafing” rule in practice. If anybody was caught taking off a rep, they had to sprint. Tonyan rarely broke the rule, but he did more sprints than anyone. “Any time a teammate loafed,” Proctor says, “Rob would run sprints right beside him.” Tonyan took that work ethic into Leathers’ gym. He did yoga a few times each week. Sometimes his workouts moved to the pool, disrupting the monotony of the grind.
“We did a lot of different things,” Leathers says, “just to keep it fun.”
The work led to Tonyan’s first shot at the NFL. After going undrafted in 2017, he signed as a free agent with the Detroit Lions. Tonyan hoped to crack the 53-man roster in Detroit, but the Lions released him at the end of his first camp. More rejection. Another denial.
Tonyan drove straight home from Detroit. For the first time since the quarterback position was ripped away, Tonyan had reason to doubt his future. “There were tough days,” Leathers says. Each time, Tonyan locked himself back in the gym. He was convinced there would be a second chance.
Then the Green Bay Packers called.
at each
other,”
Tammy Tonyan remembers the first meeting she and Bob Tonyan Sr. had with Jack Bechta, the agent who represents their son. Bechta made clear Robert Tonyan would not be an overnight success. There was too much to learn. Everyone, including Bechta, needed patience.
“He told us, ‘It’s going to take me
three years to make money from him,’ ” Tammy says.
When the Packers signed Tonyan to their practice squad in December of the 2017 season, there was little reason to think he was different than the projects that preceded him. The Packers weren’t shy about adding developmental tight ends to their roster. Before Tonyan, there was Emanuel Byrd. Before Byrd, there was Justin Perillo. Before Perillo, there was Kennard Backman. Before Backman, there was Brandon Bostick.
Though raw, Tonyan was more talented than any of them. That much was clear from the beginning. When Aaron Rodgers got reps with the scout team as he rehabbed a broken collarbone late in that 2017 season, he made sure to target Tonyan often. He says Tonyan’s ability to catch passes was innate.
“It changes the way you throw to certain guys,” Rodgers says. “You just have a different type of confidence. From the first day, Bobby Tonyan always caught the ball with his hands. I just think there’s something that kind of separates you. You would think everybody does, but not everybody trusts their hands in the same way.”
Still, Tonyan had to develop. It would take time. The jump from failed FCS quarterback to successful NFL tight end is massive. Tonyan started training in the offseason with All-Pro tight end George Kittle, whom he befriended before the 2017 draft. Kittle, who had Tonyan stand in his wedding, was a carrot to chase, the standard to measure himself.
Results have steadily increased. In 2018, Tonyan finally cracked the 53-man roster. He caught a 54-yard touchdown from Rodgers at the Seattle Seahawks later that season, a lightning bolt of a highlight that first revealed publicly what coaches and teammates knew privately, that Tonyan was loaded with untapped potential. Last season, Tonyan
showed another innate ability that impressed Rodgers: his spatial awareness on the field. On a scramble drill in Dallas, Tonyan ran down the right sideline. Rodgers floated him a pass, allowing Tonyan to leap over Cowboys cornerback Xavier Woods for a 23-yard catch.
“Robert benefited from the NFL transitioning to his style of play,” Proctor says. “Twenty years ago, he wouldn’t have been able to play tight end in the NFL. Everybody was looking for the big blocking types. Now teams want an athletic receiver they can move all around, and that’s what Robert gives you.”
In Dallas, the Robert Tonyan project was about to pay off. Then he landed.
Tonyan’s body crunched awkwardly when his legs met the ground after his dazzling catch. He would miss the next five games with a hip injury, cutting short a potential breakout season. Tonyan had just 10 catches for 100 yards in 2019. Still hungry, he set a goal this offseason to not only return, but be a difference maker in the Packers’ offense.
He’s met that goal this fall. If “Monday Night Football” was Tonyan’s arrival, the weeks since have shown it was no fluke. Tonyan led the Packers with 79 receiving yards in a Nov. 1 game against the Minnesota Vikings. His 391 yards this season are more than any Packers tight end in five years. With six games left, Tonyan might become the first Packers tight end with 50 catches and 600 yards since Jermichael Finley almost a decade ago.
“You can definitely tell it’s starting to slow down for him,” veteran Marcedes Lewis says.
After landing in the end zone Sunday at Indianapolis, Tonyan flipped the football in the air. Teammates swarmed him to celebrate. Davante Adams leaped to hip check him. In that moment, 75 miles from where this unlikely journey began, Robert Tonyan was exactly where he’s supposed to be.