After every team in the NFL passed him over in the draft, after two teams cut him, after sitting out of football for most of one season, after catching (football) passes from his wife for a couple of months to stay in shape, after all that . . . Chad Lewis was named the starting tight end for the NFC Pro Bowl team last week, four years after leaving BYU.
So much for the expertise of NFL scouts and personnel gurus. Only a year ago, Lewis was claimed off waiver wires, the NFL junk heap. Now he leads NFC tight ends in receiving, with 60 catches for 669 yards and 3 touchdowns for the playoff-bound Eagles.
"I had a lot of ups and downs my first three seasons," he said recently from his home in Philadelphia. "I was always confident if I were put in the right situation, I could do well."
How could so many teams be wrong about this guy? It wasn't as if Lewis was a secret in college. He was one of the stars on the No. 5-ranked team in the country at BYU. You can check off the usual problems — size (6-foot-6, 250 pounds), speed (4.6), athleticism (he once hurdled a tackler, which is what you can do when you have a 35-inch vertical leap). And he could catch anything he could get his hands on, even if it was just one hand — he had 111 receptions for 1,376 yards and 10 touchdowns.
If you could assemble a tight end in a laboratory, he'd be a lot like Lewis. But the NFL chose 240 players in the draft, including 15 tight ends, and Lewis wasn't one of them. Computers, scouts, coaches, combines, private workouts — they all failed to discover Lewis.
"The main thing was my blocking," says Lewis.
Blocking? Lewis, whose play was limited to passing downs during his first three seasons in the league, is a full-time player now. "I'm in on every play," he says. "I've gotten a lot better. They leave me in now on blocking downs."
But because of the knock on his blocking, which BYU rarely required of him, Lewis had an uncertain start to his NFL career.
1997: Signed with Eagles as a free agent. Stats: 12 catches, 94 yards, 4 touchdowns.
1998: Released after second game of '98 season. Signed by Rams Dec. 9. Deactivated last three games. Season stats: 0 catches.
1999: Played first six games for Rams, had one catch, then cut by eventual Super Bowl champs. Claimed by two teams on waivers — Eagles (again) and 49ers. Eagles get him by virtue of having the worse record of the two teams (by a half-game over 49ers). Becomes starter. Stats: 6 games, 7 catches, 76 yards, 3 TDs.
2000: Starts every game for Eagles. Leads team in receiving.
Think about it: Just two years ago, Lewis was out of football. After being cut by the Eagles, he returned to Orem and waited for a team to call. For the next couple of months, the closest thing to a quarterback he could find to throw passes to him was his wife, Michelle, a 6-foot former BYU All-American volleyball player who grew up playing football with her brothers. He ran a variety of routes while she fired passes at him.
"She can throw a ball probably 40 yards," says Lewis. "She's got a great arm."
Now Lewis is catching passes from Donovan McNabb and starring for the Eagles. He was right about one thing: He only needed to find the right situation and he could thrive. In Philadelphia, everything came together for him. After cutting Lewis, the Eagles hired Andy Reid as head coach and drafted McNabb, one of the best young quarterbacks in the league. When Reid claimed Lewis off the waiver wires to bring him back to Philadelphia, the coach told him, "I know you wanted to go to San Francisco and play with Steve (Young), but the fact is I want you here, and we're going to make things happen and turn things around."
Reid was the perfect coach for Lewis. Not only did he turn around the dreadful Eagles, but he installed an offense that relies heavily on the tight end as a pass receiver (Reid is a former tight ends coach for the Packers, where he worked with the likes of all-pros Keith Jackson and Mark Chmura). Reid immediately made Lewis a starter last season.
During the off-season, Lewis returned to Utah and moved into his new house in Alpine, but a week later Reid asked him to return to Philadelphia to spend the summer training with McNabb.
"I had an opportunity to be the starter, and the coaches thought it was important to get back there as soon as possible and work with Donovan," says Lewis. "As you can see, they had a pretty good vision of what it could be."
And a vision of what Lewis could be. Finally.
E-MAIL: drob@desnews.com