How a switch to QB advanced Vikings TE Gavin Bartholomew's game

Vikings' sixth-round pick tight end switched to quarterback in high school and grew because of it

© Kirby Lee-Imagn Images

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By Matthew Coller

EAGAN — Before Cory Mabry asked Gavin Bartholomew to make a big adjustment, the Blue Mountain football coach thought that he should check with the coaching staff at the University of Pittsburgh first. He called and asked how they would feel if he moved his star tight end to quarterback for the final stretch of his senior season. Mabry didn’t want to do anything to hurt his budding D-1 player’s future.

“We wanted to be able to get the ball to our best athlete,” Mabry said over the phone. “I got on the phone with some coaches with Pitt and wanted to make sure it wasn’t going to hurt his recruiting. They actually fell in love with it. They were thinking that they’d get to see what type of athlete he is.”

Mabry joked that they weren’t asking Bartholomew, who was drafted by the Minnesota Vikings in the sixth round, to be the next John Elway out there. They ran a Wing-T offense that occasionally required the 6-foot-5 Bartholomew to throw the ball downfield — though he could certainly chuck it when called upon.

“He was a super athlete,” Mabry said. “He was able to run the football, had a cannon for an arm. It worked out for us. He was able to show off his talents and the rest is history. Pitt saw his potential as an athlete and realized he brought a lot to the table.”

Bartholomew didn’t have any hesitation about switching positions that late in his career.

“He welcomed it with open arms, he loved it,” Mabry said. “He was like, ‘whatever you need me to do, I’ll do it.’ I think he looked at it as an opportunity to touch the ball every play, whether it was handling it off, running it or throwing it. He said, ‘this is great, it’s going to keep me involved a heck of a lot more than getting three balls thrown to me a game. It was an easy fit for him.”

In five games at quarterback, Bartholomew finished 36-of-66 passing for 521 yards and four touchdowns, while also rushing for 145 yards and three TDs.

Only a few months later, he graduated early from high school so he could participate in spring drills and then started at tight end as a freshman and caught 28 passes for the Panthers. From there he became one of Pitt’s most reliable options and developed over four years into an NFL draft pick.

Bartholomew feels like his experience playing QB, even for just a short time, helped him understand the game better.

“I think it helped me set up my vision for the defense and understanding the game and how defenses work,” he said following rookie minicamp practice. “It helped me take my game to the next level.”

There are a lot of skill-position players in the NFL that have played quarterback in the past, including Vikings star wide receiver Jordan Addison. Head coach Kevin O’Connell said that there are nuances to the game that he feels receivers and tight ends understand better after they have had the ball in their hands at some point along the way.

“I just think to play the quarterback position, there's such a baseline of intelligence at multiple spots, that you just end up cross learning things,” O’Connell said on Friday. “Like, how is a tight end taught to run this route, and why is he taught that so that he can win leverage in the quarterback, so I can throw that ball away from the defender? Well, now I'm the guy running the route, and it might be a little bit more of a plug-and-play kind of teaching, because he has some of that experience.”

Early in high school, Bartholomew was a tall, skinny kid who was thinking that he might have a future in college as a baseball player. But when colleges started to pay attention to his size and athleticism as a football player, he worked to put on enough strength to play with the top players, ranking as Pennsylvania’s 36th best prospect by ESPN. Mabry believes that Bartholomew playing different sports and different positions (he was also on defense and punted) played an overwhelmingly positive role in his development.

“I just believe in a multi-sport athlete being the type of kid you need to win football games for you,” Mabry said. “It was my mentality my whole life. Through college I did it and I always wanted to make sure we had kids that were able to do that. I encouraged my players to do track and field, wrestle, play basketball, whatever sport.”

Kids at Class 4A (out of six) Blue Mountain high school are probably more likely to play multiple sports than some bigger Pennsylvania schools that have NFL-producing programs and start talented players with specialization from young ages. Blue Mountain has one other player in its history who got a whiff of the league, Matt Stankiewitch, an offensive lineman who spent some offseason time with the Patriots and Jaguars in 2013 and 2014 but never saw NFL game action.

They also play a different form of football in Eastern Pennsylvania than in many of the football hotbeds around the country.

“Football in this area is characterized as hard-nosed, tough,” Mabry said. “The blue-collar type. It’s three yards and a cloud of dust type of mentality. The game has changed over the years but when you think of this area that’s how everyone categorizes football. It’s about the tough kids and how hard they fight. That’s what we’re known as and the reputation that the successful programs portray. That’s where he came from. Every game you play you’re going to come out bloody and dirty and that’s the way it’s going to be. That’s how we try to coach and how the kids play.”

Bartholomew brought his East-PA mentality to Pitt, where he caught 105 passes for 1,257 yards and 11 touchdowns over four seasons as a regular in the offense. The fact that he was a smooth athlete and played all four years with a grit to his style caught the Vikings’ eye.

“The ability to come in at that age, the pressure of that environment, come from high school, just a lot of stuff he can do,” general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah said following Day 3 of the draft. “We think he can be a hybrid YF tight end for us. He's got some route-running ability. We think he's got a lot the ability in his body. His pro day showed a lot of that….we think he's got a lot of lower-body strength to kind of help him in the run game and be somebody to help us in the run game and special teams. A good athlete. A good football player. Competitive. And you'll hear those words a lot.”

Bartholomew will have a chance to compete for the spot in the depth chart opened up by the exit of veteran Johnny Mundt. The Vikings also brought in two other tight ends in Bryson Nesbit from North Carolina and Ben Yurosek of Georgia to jockey for position during the summer.

O’Connell noted that after seeing Bartholomew in rookie camp, they are getting what they expected when they picked him in the draft.

“That's a position that sometimes between the film evaluation, the pro day, seeing the tape of it, you just hope that they show up and it looks the way, you hope that they look and Gavin definitely did,” O’Connell said. “I don't want to use the social media analogy of somebody looking exactly like they look in their picture, but Gavin definitely checked the box on that. He was moving great, caught the ball really well.”

O’Connell also mentioned that the team asked Bartholomew’s former teammate Jordan Addison about him and Addison gave a “big ole stamp of approval.”

For Mabry, seeing Bartholomew get a chance in the NFL is particularly exciting. His offensive coordinator (also his brother in-law), lived across the street from Bartholomew while he was in high school so he got to know him well over the years outside of football.

“It makes you happy for the kid and how hard he worked,” Mabry said. “He’s making everybody proud.”

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