At first, nobody was looking for Dallen Bentley. The NFL scouts cycled through Salt Lake City, and few eyes landed on a 24-year-old former JUCO tight end with exactly three catches to his collegiate name. Naturally. Eventually, Utah tight ends coach Freddie Whittingham began telling his pro scouting liaison: Bring Bentley up to whoever came to town.
Eventually, they started looking. That was good. That also brought questions, though. And one very specific inquiry.
“What’s the big thing,” Whittingham recalled scouts asking, “on his hand?”
After a Week 3 win over Wyoming in early September, as Bentley was cementing himself as one of the Utes’ primary receiving weapons, a trainer walked into Utah’s meeting room and announced Bentley had a spiral fracture in one of his fingers. A surgeon was recommending a procedure that would knock him out for six weeks, the trainer said. The staff, as Whittingham recalled, was floored.
Bentley, though, got a second opinion. Another doctor told him he didn’t to get the surgery, Whittingham remembered. It’d heal eventually, that doctor said, if he just immobilized it for long enough.
Seventh months later, the Utah tight end became a Broncos seventh-round pick — and a near-Mr. Irrelevant upside play — after catching passes the near-entirety of his senior season with a club-like contraption on his hand.
“He was essentially playing one-handed this year,” Utes head coach Kyle Whittingham told The Denver Post.
By the final picks of last Saturday’s NFL Draft, the Broncos had already made their move on an athletic tight end, packaging together a fifth-round and a sixth-round pick to move up 18 slots and nab NC State’s Justin Joly. Before a Broncos scout reached out the week of the draft, a source told The Post, Denver hadn’t had much communication with Bentley. Freddie Whittingham, even, said point-blank he didn’t expect the Broncos to take Bentley. But magically — thanks to a combination of age (25 years old) and previous injury history (32 total collegiate games), a was sitting there at No. 256.
And thus, the Broncos snagged an under-the-radar Utah tight end in the seventh round for the second draft cycle in a row.
“We must be making a good impression on them,” former Utah coach Kyle Whittingham cracked.
The situational optics are strange. The logic, though, is clear. Bentley stands 6-foot-4, weighs 253 pounds, and his testing ranks inside the top 7% of all tight end pre-draft athletic profiles since 1987, . He is old, but has only actually played tight end for four seasons. After being thrown a football exactly six times as a junior, he broke out for 620 yards and six touchdowns as a senior.
And the most eye-popping fact of all: he recorded exactly zero dropped passes in 2025, according to Pro Football Focus, despite playing nine games with that club.
“I think I’m a really great hybrid tight end who’s able to go out there and make some big plays in the passing game, and stick my hand in the dirt and make some big plays there,” Bentley said, on a post-draft conference call with reporters. “I have great hands, so I don’t drop balls. So you can trust me, in some situations.”
At the end of Day 2, Broncos general manager George Paton made plain Denver’s plan this cycle: look for “young, developmental backups with some traits that we can develop,” as Paton put it. They found several on Day 3, from Washington running back Jonah Coleman to Mr. Irrelevant linebacker Red Murdock. And Bentley fits that profile better than anyone, a one-time JUCO product who was on absolutely nobody’s radar at the beginning of last season.
After graduating from Taylorsville High in Utah, a then 5-foot-11 Bentley embarked on a year-long mission trip in Colorado through the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Somehow, he “grew like 5 inches” by the time he returned, as Freddie Whittingham recalled. Bentley decided to try football, enrolled at Snow College in Utah as a walk-on, caught eight passes in eight games, and drew Utah’s attention as a big local kid who could move.
That single spiral fracture, though, threatened to wipe out any hope Bentley had of realizing his potential as a Ute. His first year at Utah brought a hamstring strain that he tweaked several times in practice, as Freddie Whittingham remembered. His second year brought a broken hand in fall camp and a majority-blocking role as a backup. 2025 was meant to be his breakout, until he was thwarted again by his own body.
Instead, he wrapped his pinky, ring and middle fingers together in a hard cast for more than two months.
“A lot of guys would’ve just pulled the plug,” Kyle Whittingham said, “and gotten that surgery. But he wanted to prove himself because of the frustrations he had, in years previous.”
After Bentley’s first practice with the splint, Freddie Whittingham looked down at his hand and wondered if he’d still be able to catch a football. After practice, the Utah tight ends coach chuckled, and the staff realized that wouldn’t be an issue. Bentley managed to figure out how to use the cast to brace a pass against himself as it came in, and Utah began wrapping his brace in the same red-and-black color as his gloves to try to throw other programs off the scent.
“I don’t know how many teams noticed,” Freddie Whittingham said, “or didn’t notice.”
Maybe they did. Maybe they didn’t. Bentley still caught 48 passes — again, without a drop -— and had the seventh-highest PFF run-blocking grade of 22 Big 12 tight ends with at least 100 run-blocking snaps in 2025.
When the cast finally came off for a Las Vegas Bowl matchup against Nebraska, Bentley had his best game of the season in a 44-24 win: six catches, 106 yards, a touchdown.
“It was pretty impressive,” Kyle Wittingham said, “given the circumstances.”
He’ll have his work cut out for him in training camp, as the Broncos will introduce widespread competition with a slew of tight ends of varying skillsets: veteran receiver Evan Engram, veteran blockers Adam Trautman and Nate Adkins, and youngsters Joly and Caleb Lohner. Bentley is a dart thrown into the mix, a traditional in-line blocker who can also split out to the slot and beat zone coverage.
Importantly, he should also have both hands available this fall.
“He’s just sneaky athletic … he can line up in-line at the line of scrimmage and block, you can also involve him in the pass game,” Freddie Whittingham said. “So I think it’ll be interesting to see what they do.”
