Sometimes it pays to be literal: Eli Stowers is the most interesting tight end in the 2026 NFL Draft.
Is he the best? I have no idea. He could be: he won the 2025 Mackey Award as the best tight end in college football, and he runs like a gazelle, putting down a 4.51-second 40-yard dash at 6-foot-4 and 239 pounds. He’s a bit on the small side (technically, he’s comfortably under 6-foot-4) and he’s not much of a blocker (he lined up in the slot on nearly three quarters of his plays in college), but that’s beside the point, which is this: he’s interesting.
I submit nobody’s had a more interesting road to where they are now than Stowers, who started his college career as a quarterback at Texas A&M. After two years there, he had played in just five games (two as a backup tight end) and had torn the labrum in his throwing shoulder, so he transferred to New Mexico State, where his dad had played college football.
At New Mexico State in 2023, he played a little bit of quarterback, a little bit of tight end, and a little bit of wide receiver, but ultimately ended the quarterback portion of his football career after losing a competition for the job to junior college transfer Diego Pavia — which is funny, because a year later, Pavia would transfer to Vanderbilt. And so would Stowers. Where he’d finally play tight end full time and catch a whole bunch of passes from Pavia.
Stowers was All-SEC in 2024 and All-America in 2025, winning the aforementioned Mackey award for his efforts. He led the Commodores in receptions in 2025, too — as a converted quarterback catching passes from the quarterback who kicked him out of the position.
And amid all this, he won the William V. Campbell Trophy in 2025, also known as the academic Heisman. How does one do such a thing? Well, here’s how Stowers spent his time from the spring of 2024 through the fall of 2025. He graduated from New Mexico State in the spring of 2024 (maintaining a GPA of 3.92), then had finished a master’s degree in finance by the spring of 2025. He spent the fall of 2025 (while, again, putting together a season deemed to be the best in the country by a player at his position) pursuing a postgraduate degree at Vanderbilt in legal studies.
I think all of that means Stowers sufficiently clears the bar for “interesting,” wouldn’t you say? Sure, NFL front offices will want to know whether or not he’s good, but that’s almost beside the point.