Entering last season, my main question about the tight end room wasn’t the quality of the players; it was how much new head coach Clark Lea and new offensive coordinator David Raih Joey Lynch would use the tight ends.
The answer: not much. Vanderbilt’s tight ends combined to catch just fifteen passes in 2021; to put that number in perspective, in 2020, Ben Bresnahan caught 28 passes by himself. This didn’t appear to be a decline in performance, either; while the passing game in general wasn’t very effective in 2021, Vanderbilt also didn’t seem to be making much use of the tight ends.