Cole
Turner.
Cole
Turner.
Nevada· 6'6"· 246 lb· 4.76s 40
Turner is a converted wide receiver playing tight end, and the tape reads that way. Nevada's Air Raid detached him from the formation on almost every snap, flexing him into the slot or out wide and letting him work seams, corners and back-shoulder throws against safeties and nickels. He tracks the deep ball naturally and high-points it with long arms and basketball timing in the red zone.
He is not a mover for his size — speed and burst are pedestrian — so the separation comes from leverage, stems and body control rather than explosion. As a blocker he is a positional screener who will wall off a defender but does not displace anyone. The signature is red-zone scoring: 19 touchdown catches across his two seasons at the position.
Spread, 11-personnel passing offense that detaches its tight end and lives on seam and red-zone throws rather than in-line run blocking.
Year 1: situational third tight end and red-zone target. Ceiling: high-volume flex receiving tight end in a spread offense that never lines him up in-line.
A two-tight-end, gap-scheme run offense that asks its Y to block a 260-pound edge defender on duo and counter.
His value collapses the moment a coordinator demands base-personnel blocking snaps.
Cole Turner 2021 Full Season Highlights | Nevada TE
Senior-season reel: seam work, corner routes and red-zone scoring from a detached alignment.
Cole Turner | Nevada TE | 2020 Highlights
First-team All-Mountain West season after his move from receiver to tight end.
Cole Turner (Nevada TE) vs Boise State (2021)
Single-game cutup against a conference rival showing every snap, blocking reps included.
Turner arrived at Nevada as a receiver and finished as one of the most productive scoring tight ends in college football, which is the whole evaluation in one sentence. He is a 6-foot-6 flex target with a receiver's route feel and a wide catch radius, groomed inside an Air Raid offense that almost never asked him to put a hand in the dirt.
Production came late but came in volume: two catches as a freshman, four as a sophomore, then 49 for 605 and nine scores in the shortened 2020 season for first-team All-Mountain West honors, and 62 for 677 with 10 touchdowns in 2021 for a second-team nod. He played in the 2022 Senior Bowl. The flags were obvious on the same tape: a 4.76 forty and a 29-inch vertical at 249 pounds, almost no in-line blocking reps against real edge defenders, and production built on matchups against Mountain West safeties rather than on winning at the point of attack.
The board treated him as a Day 3 developmental move tight end whose red-zone scoring might translate if he added functional strength. Washington taking him 149th overall was a bet on the catch radius and the size, made by a team that already had Logan Thomas and John Bates and could afford to redshirt him. It was a low-cost swing at a specialist trait.
- 01
Catch radius
a 6-foot-6 frame with long arms and basketball timing, able to pluck throws well outside his frame and adjust to poorly placed balls down the seam.
- 02
Red-zone scoring
19 touchdown catches in two seasons at the position, with 10 in 2021 ranking second among all FBS tight ends behind Brock Bowers.
- 03
Receiver route feel
stems defenders, sets up corner and seam breaks with real detail, and understands how to find space against zone because he learned the position outside.
- 04
Matchup problem detached
flexes into the slot or out wide and forces defenses to pick between an overmatched safety and a nickel who cannot contest the high ball.
- 05
Production trajectory
went from four career catches to first-team all-conference in one year after switching positions, a clear sign of coachability and fast learning.
- 01
Athletic testing
a 4.76 forty, 29-inch vertical and 7.06 three-cone at 249 pounds put him near the bottom of the class in both explosion and speed for the position.
- 02
In-line blocking
almost no reps with a hand in the dirt; he screens and positions rather than displacing, which caps his snap count in base offensive personnel.
- 03
Play strength
gets stalled by physical jams and struggles to run through contact after the catch, so there is little added yardage once he is touched.
- 04
Level of competition
his production was built against Mountain West safeties and nickels rather than NFL-caliber coverage defenders in tight quarters.
— — — positional median (p50)
- 40 yd
- 4.76sp50
- Vertical
- 27inp50
- Broad jump
- 120inp50
- Three-cone
- 7.06sp50
- Shuttle
- 4.41sp50
- Bench
- 17repp50
| Yr | Team | G | Rec | Yds | TD |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | Nevada | 12 | 2 | 37 | 1 |
| 2019 | Nevada | — | 4 | 51 | 0 |
| 2020 | Nevada | 9 | 49 | 605 | 9 |
| 2021 | Nevada | 11 | 62 | 677 | 10 |
| Career | — | 32 | 117 | 1370 | 20 |
Receiving verified against cfbstats (2020-2021) and ESPN season logs (2018-2019); season sums match the career line. Games played in 2019 could not be verified from a primary source and are left blank rather than estimated, so no career games total is published.
A dash means the figure is not published by a source we trust — never a zero we invented.
Converted receiver with rare length whose lack of blocking and burst keeps him to a handful of snaps.
Big-bodied receiving tight end who turns red-zone size into steady touchdown production for a decade.
Late-round size bet who scores a few early touchdowns and then bounces between practice squads.
Everything above is the pre-draft evaluation. This section is what actually happened — updated year over year.
Washington never found a role for him. Turner played ten games as a rookie in 2022 with two catches for 23 yards, then 12 games in 2023 with 11 catches for 120 yards and no touchdowns, sitting behind Logan Thomas and John Bates in an offense that needed its tight ends to block. He was waived at final cuts in August 2024 and re-signed to the practice squad, then waived again at cuts in August 2025. Tennessee added him to its practice squad that December, Miami signed him to a reserve/futures deal in January 2026, and he was waived/injured at the end of that summer and reverted to injured reserve. Four seasons after the pick, he has 13 career catches for 143 yards and no touchdowns.
The retrospective is straightforward: the thing he could not do turned out to matter more than the thing he could. A flex tight end who does not block has to separate or win contested balls against NFL safeties, and the testing numbers were a warning that he would not. Nevada's Air Raid had hidden that by never asking him to operate in traffic. At pick 149 the cost was small, but the profile was one Washington had already stacked and the fit was poor from the first camp.