UNICORN ON THE LOOSE
NFL teams are drooling over the best tight end to come out of the college ranks in years
Kyle Pitts needed only two minutes to prove he had become what someone once told him he would never be. In five plays that spanned the middle of Florida's season-opening win over Mississippi last year, the all-american tight end displayed the breadth of his versatility, lining up across the formation to have a hand in three first downs and a pair of touchdowns.
He blocked a defensive end off the line to help secure a first down on a quarterback run, flexed out wide to overpower a cornerback on a hitch route, shifted back in-line to tack on a 19-yard catch, switched to the other side for a touchdown grab in double coverage, then split two defenders for a 71-yard score up the middle.
“He's kind of like a unicorn, and the only way you can defend a unicorn is with another unicorn,” Florida coach Dan Mullen said. “So if you don't have a unicorn on defence, you got a problem.”
Pitts had four touchdowns and 170 yards that day, which warned the sparse Mississippi crowd that a “scary” season was brewing — something his subsequent opponents would eventually find out.
At six foot six and 245 pounds with 4.4 speed, Pitts is a matchup nightmare — built too big for a cornerback, too fast for a linebacker and too versatile for any coach to keep on the bench. Align him attached to the offensive line, and he's a more-than-willing blocker. Move him to H-back, and he'll make plays out of the backfield.
He can turn contested catches into “80-20” balls in his favour, create separation with his strength, and beat defenders with a quick acceleration that defies his size. And he's only 20 years old.
In a game decided by mismatches, Pitts has been deemed so rare that some analysts believe he's worthy of a top-five pick. The last tight end selected that high was Riley Odoms, taken by the Denver Broncos 49 years ago.
“The defence can't be right against him, no matter what you do,” NFL Network's Daniel Jeremiah said. “You put big guys out there, he's going to run away from them. You put small guys out there, he's just going to pluck the ball off their heads. That, to me, is what makes him special.”
When he's on the field, the exceptionalism and potential in Pitts' game isn't hard to see. But how he got here can be difficult to envision. While the voices lauding his play are loud now, they can't overpower the one Pitts has replayed in his head repeatedly over the past six years.
“Those who keep saying what he can't do, that's an extreme motivator for him,” said his father, Kelly. “And I don't have to say anything. I can just sit back and watch.”
In recent years, Pitts has watched as the NFL'S elite tight ends rewrite the position. The positional lines have been blurred by the likes of Travis Kelce, George Kittle and Darren Waller, who aren't simply extra blockers or H-backs limited to a few targets per game. They're playmakers who warrant being their quarterback's primary target.
“These guys are really jumbo wide receivers,” said Bucky Brooks, a former defensive back and current NFL Network analyst.
“They create mismatches all over the field . ... If you have one of those guys on the field, it changes the game. So everyone is looking for that kind of guy who can serve as an anchor to the passing game, because if they can create mismatches or draw double teams, it opens up the field for other guys on the perimeter.”
But for Pitts' first two years of high school, at Abington Senior High some 20 kilometres north of Philadelphia, he was a two-way player, at linebacker and quarterback, and didn't care for either position.
He longed to play tight end, to be a hybrid offensive weapon.
“I knew I would never play defence,” Pitts said. “I knew I would never play quarterback because I didn't love it. I was at practice dreading it. I always wanted to score and I love hitting people, and that's half and half of playing tight end.”
As Pitts remembers it, when he asked if he could try tight end, his coach at Abington declined.
“(He said), `You won't make it,'” Pitts recalled. “`You'll be lucky to go to college and get looks.' That's the main thing that I'll never forget . ... Until the day I stop playing football, I'll remember that line.”
It's unclear what the coach's rationale was — at the time, Pitts was thin and not yet a refined receiver — but Pitts has used it as motivation since. Kelly and Theresa Pitts transferred their son to Archbishop Wood, a Catholic high school in Warminster, Pa., before the start of his junior season, largely so he could play the position he wanted. Pitts helped Archbishop Wood to a pair of state championships and quickly gained national exposure at tight end, choosing Florida out of more than 20 Division I scholarship offers.
But the four-star recruit wasn't a star tight end from the outset at Florida. Pitts spent the majority of his freshman season as a receiver and special teamer, stashed behind three fifth-year seniors at tight end.
There was a plan, however.
“I'm looking for guys that I can create matchups against, and I saw this big guy. He might not look like your prototypical tight end just yet, but we can create the matchups with him,” Mullen said. “We did a lot of receiver work because there's a lot of skill work that comes in to releases, route running, using your body control and how to catch the ball.”
Mullen told Pitts early in his freshman season that he wanted him to learn the offence from the outside first. It was an extension of something his father had told him his senior year of high school, encouraging him to stick his nose in the wide receivers room.
“`You're going to make a living being able to do more than one thing,'” Kelly recalled telling him.
When Tim Brewster succeeded Larry Scott as Florida's tight ends coach last year, he encouraged the same. He challenged Pitts to “take everything to a whole new level,” from his route running to his breaks to his blocking. So they studied Kittle. And Kelce. And Waller. Brewster emphasized building Pitts' reputation on toughness, not simply his athleticism.
Occasionally, Brewster, who used to be an assistant at North Carolina, regaled Pitts with stories of watching Michael Jordan and other former UNC stars return to campus for pickup games during the summer.
“Our football coaching staff, we would go down to the Dean Dome and watch these pickup games,” Brewster said. “Watching Michael Jordan go against Vince Carter — and those two didn't like each other — I had never seen anything in my life like those guys going at each other, just from a competitive standpoint. Either you have that or you don't. (Pitts) is one of them kids. He's kind of like Michael Jordan. They accept a challenge, like: `Are you challenging me? Are you really doing that?'”
Last summer, Pitts maintained his regimen with his longtime trainer, Greg Garrett, owner of Level 40 Performance Center just outside Philadelphia. Since he was 13, Pitts had worked with Garrett and alongside other pro clients, including 2013 first-round defensive tackle Sharrif Floyd and current Miami Dolphins wide receiver Will Fuller.
Pitts has always played with older teammates and trained a level (or two) ahead.
“He's just different,” Garrett said. “Whereas other kids, it might take them a little longer to catch on and mentally mature, he has an old soul. I get in the car and he's playing an old-school song, like the Temptations or Luther (Vandross), and he'll be blasting it.”
Pitts learned more with each season. In 2019, his first year as a starter at Florida, Pitts was named first-team ALL-SEC by coaches and The Associated Press after leading the conference's tight ends in catches (54) and receiving yards (649). His biggest battle often wasn't against the defence — it was against the scale.
“I was playing kind of light, around 237, 236, and I was hurting at the end of the year,” he said. “So this past year I said, `This isn't going to happen again.' I'm not going to be sore after every game to the point where it's like not even comfortable playing because you're trying to do so much to eat and take care of your body.”
Pitts said he played around 243 pounds last season and added even more over the past few months to hover around 250 before his pro day. At anything less than 245, he knows, he'll be viewed as a receiver — a one-dimensional player, not the hybrid he aspires to be.
The added muscle showed in his play last year, and so did his expanded film study. Every detail provided him more of an edge on his opponents. In eight games he had 43 catches for 770 yards (a 17.9-yard average). He didn't have a single drop on 66 targets, and his 12 touchdowns set a single-season record for a Florida tight end. He could have had more, but a helmet-to-helmet hit during a win over Georgia sidelined him for two games with a broken nose and a concussion.
Pitts could have stopped it all then. A first-round slot in the NFL draft was already all but reserved for him. But he still had things to prove to himself and those few voices.
“Everything that he wanted, he was going to get that — in addition to the things people said he couldn't do,” Kelly said.
He's kind of like a unicorn, and the only way you can defend a unicorn is with another unicorn. So, if you don't have a unicorn on defence, you got a problem.