Meet Rico Gathers, the Best Bet to Be the NFL’s Next Antonio Gates

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When you ask Rico Gathers to choose his first love between basketball and football, the answer is instant. It comes without a beat of hesitation. 

“Football.”

Then when you ask him about the last football game he played, the details flow from a memory that’s etched deep.

“My last game was the junior high championship game,” he told Bleacher Report. “It started out with me scoring four straight touchdowns in the first half. They basically all came on the same play. We just kept going to it, and then suddenly it was 28-0.”

This is when you stop, and do a double or triple take if you know little about Gathers. Something doesn’t quite add up with that timeline.

And maybe you don’t know much about him. Maybe you’re only a casual college basketball follower.

Let’s have Gathers introduce himself a little more then.

“I’ve studied as much film of Antonio Gates, Jimmy Graham, Rob Gronkowski and Tony Gonzalez as I can,” he said. “I studied them all because I feel like I fit the same frame.”

That’s just a peek into Gathers’ mindset as he prepares to take his own unique journey down a well-worn path, but one still filled with career quicksand.

The former Baylor power forward is trying to shimmy through the basketball-to-football tight end pipeline, a trail blazed long ago by future Hall of Famer Tony Gonzalez. The San Diego Chargers’ Antonio Gates followed, and so did the Seattle Seahawks’ Jimmy Graham, among others.

Those are the names that slide off Gathers’ tongue immediately when discussing his own tight end ambitions. They’re also the names that usually flash in your mind right away when naming successful basketball-to-football tight end transfers.

But Gathers is different. Among a group of triangular-shaped basketball pegs trying to fit into square football holes, he’s the rectangle.  

He’s the outcast in a group of outliers, with Gates the only real historical comparison to fall back on. Graham at least played one year of college football and was invited to the Senior Bowl, and Gonzalez logged three seasons for the California Golden Bears, recording 500-plus receiving yards in the last two. Gates, meanwhile, didn’t take the field once at Kent State, and instead stayed focused on basketball before holding a private workout prior to the draft.

Where did Gathers’ last football snap take place, along with those four touchdowns? East St. John Elementary. That’s certainly not some SEC football powerhouse—unless conference realignment takes a truly radical turn someday.

Gathers hasn’t played competitive football since he was on a middle school field at the age of 14. In the years since, he shifted his athletic focus to the hard court, and in 2011 he was named Louisiana’s Mr. Basketball. The award given to the best high school basketball player in the state has also been handed to Glen “Big Baby” Davis and three-time NBA All-Star Paul Millsap.

But even as Gathers kept bruising bodies down low over four years for Baylor while leading his conference in offensive rebounds during the 2015-16 season (128) and in total rebounds the previous year (394), he always had his first love in mind.

The NFL knew it, too. That’s why the talent gem search often took scouts to a foreign place with squeaks and shot clocks. They were there to watch a chiseled athletic specimen who stands 6’7” and weighs 278 pounds.

They were there to watch Rico Gathers.

Several scouts in attendance to watch this one. Among them? A scout from the Buffalo Bills. Hello Rico Gathers.

— Shehan Jeyarajah (@ShehanJeyarajah) February 2, 2016

Or rather, they found themselves at a basketball game to dream, to wish and to hope. Just as Gathers is doing now, though he’s skipping the last part.

Gathers isn’t hoping, or lacking for confidence, despite his lengthy eight-year layoff from football. He set a plan in motion the moment Baylor was bounced by Yale in a shocking first-round NCAA tournament upset on March 17. It’s a plan that will culminate on April 25 when Gathers holds a private workout for NFL scouts.

He’s going back to his football roots, aiming to transition from rebounder to pass-snatcher, all while making his lack of high-level experience in the sport an afterthought.

It’s a path Gathers had tucked away in the back of his mind ever since he last laced up cleats, a path that became a physical necessity.

 

A growth spurt, and a plan

Gathers was a wide receiver during that final game at East St. John Elementary. But he wasn’t just your typical sprouting teenage beanpole. His body had already stretched to 6’3” at the time, and by the end of eighth grade, he passed the 6’5” mark.

Suddenly he was the long-limbed spider-like human who towered high above those of merely average height, which led to a common growth-spurt problem of fumbling clumsiness. Gathers’ mind hadn’t caught up to his body yet.

“Whenever you grow quickly to like 6’5 ½” at an early age, your coordination will be off a little bit,” Gathers said. “It happens so fast, then you reach the point where you’re thinking, ‘All right, cool, I’m 6’5” now, but I haven’t adjusted physically yet, and I’ll have guys diving at my knees in football.’ So staying with football would have made me more prone to injury at an early age.

“To avoid that we thought it was best for me to go ahead and play basketball, because it isn’t as physical,” he added. “It was a best-case scenario, even though I brought my own physicality to basketball.”

Yes, you certainly did that, Rico. Whether it was blocking…

Baylor lost, but Rico Gathers still gave us this: https://t.co/g9leCRtFcs https://t.co/vnNGgtdf3P

— SB Nation (@SBNation) March 18, 2016

Or making posters.

That dunk by @BaylorAthletics’ Rico Gathers just brought me back to last year in Morgantown. Hurts to watch. pic.twitter.com/CqvpUlI6hz

— Matt Hauswirth (@mhauswirth_WVi) February 2, 2016

The “we” Gathers refers to is his older brother Greg, who planted the seed for Rico’s football passion. Greg starred at Georgia Tech and was an All-American defensive end.

“I used to go to a lot of his games,” Rico said. “Watching him is where I got my ambition to play football. The love of the game really started young.”

The younger Gathers brother first put pads on at the age of seven. He played pretty much everywhere, including quarterback, his first true position. Gathers would play wherever his coaches thought they would gain an advantage by utilizing their quickly growing cloud-scraper.

But then the two brothers had a long conversation, where one tapped into the other’s athletic experience. It came after Rico was a Pop Warner and middle school football stud.

“My brother and I sat around and talked, and at first my intention was to go to my brother’s high school to play both sports,” Rico said. “But after a while we decided it was probably best for me to focus on basketball because I had that unique growth spurt at an early age right before high school.

“A lot of the coaches in my area wanted me to play football for them, trying to get me to come to their school. Every school in the Greater New Orleans area wanted me for football.”

That didn’t stop once Gathers stuck with basketball and went to Baylor. Art Briles, Baylor’s head football coach, was chasing after the rebound machine as recently as mid-March, making a final effort to convince Gathers that one year of college football is the best direction for his development.

On March 16—one day before Baylor’s first and only NCAA tournament game—Briles told Craig Smoak of 1660 …

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