However this grand experiment is, in grief or in glory, Caleb Lohner will have Donald Driver in part to thank. They crossed paths one day in Flower Mound, Texas, where Lohner grew up playing youth hoops after a 14-year NFL career with the Green Bay Packers. Driver took an interest in the thoughtful, enigmatic young man, and eventually lent an ear when Lohner was in the muck of deciding his athletic future.
In 2024, after two years racking up bench minutes at Baylor, Lohner asked Driver if it wasn’t a crazy idea for him to switch to football for his final collegiate season of eligibility.
“I just wanted a little bit of feedback, like, ‘Hey, is this something that you think I should pursue? Is it worth doing? Be honest with me,’ kinda thing,” Lohner told The Denver Post, on Saturday. “So he’s had a little hand in some of my success, and hope to be, future successes.”
That hand has pulled even more strings, now, after Lohner transferred to Utah to play football as a tight end in fall 2024 and became an out-of-nowhere Broncos seventh-round pick in spring 2025. After a rookie season spent entirely on the practice squad, Lohner has spent considerable time this offseason training with former four-time Pro Bowl receiver Driver — drilling the raw tight end’s footwork, hands and releases on his routes.
And between a year of scout-team reps and an offseason spent with one of the NFL’s modern-great route technicians, the 6-foot-7 Lohner has finally stopped treading water.
“I feel like a different person,” Lohner said. “I feel like my mind can finally take a step back, and breathe.”
A year ago, Lohner walked into the Broncos’ facility for rookie minicamp as a 23-year-old who’d played exactly 57 game snaps of organized football in his life. A year later, Lohner walked back in for another rookie minicamp as a 24-year-old who’s still played exactly 57 game snaps of organized football in his life. The difference lies between the margins and between the ears, as the Broncos drafted him late in 2025 knowing they’d need to stash him early on for developmental reps.
On Saturday, asked how Denver decides what returning players to invite to its rookie minicamp, head coach Sean Payton paused and offered a rare unprompted name-drop.
“I’ll tell you who stood out — Caleb,” Payton said. “Like, he looks entirely different in this camp. Now, he was here in this camp a year ago as a draft pick, but he stood out.”
Payton was asked, a beat later, what exactly looked different. He didn’t hesitate.
“Everything,” Payton said. “Everything … one year into the program and how he’s moving, what he’s doing, everything looks entirely different.”
Easy for Payton to say, cynically. The man, after all, made a sales pitch to Lohner that the Broncos would turn him into “the next Jimmy Graham,” as Payton told Lohner before taking him at pick No. 241 in 2025. The young tight end, though, has also caught the eye of those even younger at this weekend’s minicamp.
“Super, uber-athletic,” fifth-round rookie tight end Justin Joly told reporters Saturday, on Lohner. “He can jump out the sky. Fast, quick-twitch. It was great, all the tight ends, we get to learn from him, just asking as many questions as possible.”
“He’s a basketball guy,” added seventh-round TE Dallen Bentley, who played a year with Lohner at Utah in 2024. “But you can’t say that anymore. He’s definitely got his stuff down, and he’s working really hard every single day.”
Back in that senior year, Lohner walked away from a chunk of NIL basketball money to transfer to Utah for football and make $0, as tight ends coach Freddie Whittingham told The Post last year. He started, at first, not knowing how to as much tug on his pads. He caught a total of four passes in 2024 — all red-zone box-out touchdowns.
And still, his old Utes coaches came away convinced he was destined for dzٳԲat the NFL level.
“His ceiling is – he hasn’t even tapped into how good of a football player he can become,” Morgan Scalley, now Utah’s head coach, told The Post last year.
Lohner, entering his second NFL season, is getting there. He is gentle by nature, a young man who preferred swimming in the Provo River to taking ice baths in the training room back in his two years playing hoops at BYU. But the physicality of playing NFL football came naturally, from years spent boxing out on basketball courts. Lohner even spent time as a scout-team outside linebacker on game weeks last year, Payton said, helping mimic opposing rushers for Denver’s tackles.
The blocking part of playing tight end, then, has been “a little easier to develop,” as Payton said. The receiving part — ironically, the traits the Broncos swung on — has been slower to come along.
That’s where Driver came in, this offseason.
“Being with someone thatap done it – he’s able to look at it and tell me, ‘Hey, you gotta do this a little bit better. I want your hands up here, your feet need to be a little tighter,'” Lohner said. “So I think he helped me with a lot of small things.”
Those details will be the separator, in a room that’s become cluttered. There’s no guarantee Lohner even makes the practice squad in 2026, after the Broncos drafted Joly and Bentley in this year’s draft. Denver began last season with four tight ends on the active roster and one (Lohner) on the 16-man practice squad; they now return key veterans Evan Engram and Adam Trautman, rookies Joly and Bentley, blocking favorite Nate Adkins, and returners Lohner and Lucas Krull. It’s a math problem that will inevitably cross out several variables.
If the Lohner leap is as real as Payton’s words, though, that grand experiment could see results as early as this season.
“You knew there was going to be a developmental upside — but that,” Payton said, on Lohner’s Year Two growth, “was encouraging.”
