How basketball and volleyball keyed Mike Gesicki’s rise to a top NFL draft prospect

INDIANAPOLIS — After Penn State quarterback Trace McSorley scored a touchdown against Michigan in Happy Valley last October, his tight end, Mike Gesicki, took a risk.

McSorley was celebrating his score, and he wasn’t looking at Gesicki. The 6’5 tight end ran up behind his QB and did something that put both Gesicki’s manhood and McSorley’s head at significant risk. Gesicki wanted to play a quick game of leapfrog.

Gesicki likes to jump, and he likes to dunk things that aren’t his quarterback’s head, too. He’s a former basketball and volleyball player who had Division I scholarship offers in both sports — from Penn State volleyball and from a handful of Patriot League hoops teams. He’s a ferocious dunker of basketballs, as exhibited here:

Gesicki came on strong in his junior and senior seasons at Penn State. He had 1,242 receiving yards and 14 touchdowns across the two years, after not contributing much of anything on offense as a freshman or sophomore. Gesicki is long and lanky and not known as much of a blocking tight end, but his vertical receiving chops have made him a popular man in the run-up to the 2018 NFL Draft. He’ll be one of the first few tight ends taken.

“When the ball’s in the air, I consider it mine,” Gesicki says. “I don’t believe in the whole 50/50 ball. It’s more of a, from my perspective, 80/20, in that range.”

At the combine, Gesicki pulled off an outrageous 41.5-inch vertical.

Tons of draft prospects were multi-sport athletes. Gesicki is one of this year’s best examples of how other sports can feed a football career.

“It’s helped it a ton, basketball and volleyball,” he says. “In basketball, going up to get a rebound or going up to attack the rim or dunk on somebody. In volleyball, going up for a spike. Getting up to the highest point and hand-eye coordination, just everything that those games have to offer, I’ve been able to translate that to my football and, overall, my athletic ability.”

It helps to be 6’5 and have arms longer than 34 inches. But Gesicki’s game is so rooted in jumping high in the air and coming down gracefully that it’s impossible not to look to basketball and volleyball as direct causes of his success.

“Jumping has always come pretty natural for me, and it’s only improved as time’s gone on,” he says. “It’s something that I’ve been able to implement into my game on the field.”

When Gesicki was a kid, he played point guard.

“By the time I was 6’6, 215, 220 in high school, I wasn’t really playing point guard much more,” he says. “I could still handle the ball, shoot, all that kind of stuff.”

Fast-forward to Gesicki’s college football career. The first thing that jumps off the tape about him is that he’s quite large and quite fast. The next thing is that he’s nimble, with the kind of hand-eye coordination and body control that can’t be taught.

(That one wouldn’t count in the NFL. He’ll figure it out.)

In college, Gesicki’s rise coincided with Penn State’s. He became a key part of a program revival that now has PSU looking elite again.

He wasn’t the driver. If that was anyone, it was running back Saquon Barkley, who’s been the far-and-away star of this combine. But Gesicki, McSorley, and others in Penn State’s passing game took the Nittany Lions from a middling Big Ten team to one of the five or six best programs in the country over the last two years. Right before that, the Lions were languishing, and Gesicki was coming off a bad sophomore season.

“I’m here today because of that year. Just had a few uncharacteristic drops, wasn’t really playing to my full potential,” he says. “I’m so thankful for that time period, because my first two years at Penn State, I don’t know if I was thinking things were going to come easier, but my first two years, I had 24 catches. My last two years, I had 105. Going through that adversity and those kind of struggles, it made me work harder.”

Gesicki will add to a long history of Penn State tight ends in the league. He’ll be at least the 22nd to appear in an NFL game since 1972, according to a count at Pro Football Reference.

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Source : https://www.sbnation.com/nfl/2018/3/3/17073236/mike-gesicki-tight-end-penn-state-basketball-nfl-draft-combine-2018