The culprit, a teenage Evan Engram admitted a decade ago to an Ole Miss coach, was bad pizza.
Maybe it wasn’t even bad pizza. These days, the two-time Pro Bowler’s greatest challenges are rehabbing his limbs and burning opposing linebackers. Those days, one of Engram’s greatest challenges was cheese. He couldn’t handle it without throwing up, childhood friend Justin Haney recalled.
“I just kind of assumed,” Haney cracked when told this story, “he would know better not to eat cheese before a tryout.”
It could’ve been legitimately bad pizza, eaten the night before. It could’ve been regular pizza, with a dose of unexpected cheese. Either way, former Ole Miss coach Maurice Harris remembered how the 200-pound kid who showed up to that Rebels summer camp back in 2012 could barely make it through a drill without puking his guts out.
On that day, Engram would work with the group, Harris recalled, then disappear. Blocking drill. Gone. One-on-ones. Gone. Harris, who coached tight ends at Ole Miss at the time, would search for him, confused. Then he’d get frustrated. It wasn’t until later, when he confronted the high school kid on it, that Engram admitted he was excusing himself to vomit.
Halfway through he and his mom’s car ride back home to Georgia, then-Ole Miss offensive-line coach Matt Luke called Engram and offered him a scholarship.
“He’s going there, his face over a trash can, and he’s getting back in and competing? And not just competing, dominating?” Harris recalled thinking of Engram, then an underrecruited three-star receiver.
“We found out the truth,” Harris continued, a few words later, “and man, I was like, ‘Yeah, this kid is a baller.’”
Baller. Ballplayer. It was how old Hillgrove High coach Phil Ironside once described Engram to a coach from Georgia who came through one spring. But that coach came and went, and others with him, because few schools knew quite what to do with this beanpole of a pass-catcher — not fast enough to be a burner on the outside, not heavy enough to be a traditional tight end, floating in no-man’s-land between scouting categories.
Ole Miss had the same concerns. They didn’t think he’d be heavy enough, at first, to play tight end in the SEC. But that summer day was a hallmark of Engram’s journey, as coaches saw beyond the trips to the trash can and through to the chip on his shoulder.
It’s taken long years for Engram to find that same fit in the NFL. His first-round journey in New York ended in a heap of drops and broken confidence. But three years in Jacksonville gave him life again, Engram turning into one of the best pass-catching threats in the league in a 2023 Pro Bowl season.
After being released in the offseason, he found a mutual fit with the Broncos, who keyed in on the 6-foot-3 tight end in free agency as the type of amorphous matchup nightmare that could elevate head coach Sean Payton’s offense.
“They just had a real vision for him,” Engram’s longtime personal coach Drew Lieberman told The Denver Post. “They were kind of, one of the first teams to contact him. … He just felt like they understood all the different things he could do.”
Engram “loves Batman,” Lieberman said. And in Denver, the ballplayer who’s never quite found a name for his skillset will be known in one word: Joker.
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For years, inside the Dallas Cowboys’ facility, former head coach Jason Garrett and assistant Derek Dooley would discuss the need for a new name for a pass-catching-centric type of tight end. There would be a constant debate in NFL free agency around this particular type of guy: Should they be paid like wide receivers (more), or like tight ends (less)?
“I used to argue, it’s neither,” recalled Dooley, who later coached the Giants’ tight ends in 2021. “There’s this unique role in the middle there, that needs its own market.”
That role can be best defined as a “mismatch player.” Someone big enough to make it tough for a smaller defender, like a defensive back, to cover them. Someone fast enough to make it tough for a bigger defender, like a linebacker, to cover them.
Engram, Dooley said, is a mismatch player.
Payton has another name for it: a “Joker,” which is a tight end or running back who can exploit mismatches in the middle of the field. The concept has existed inside NFL offenses for a while. But the term was coined by Payton, who described former tight ends he’d coached like Jeremy Shockey and Jason Witten as a “Joker-type player” in his end-of-season presser in January.
Put simply by former NFL receiver Mohamed Sanu, who’s trained with Engram for years: “Someone that can do things that many can’t.”
Back in Hillgrove High’s fieldhouse, as Ironside remembered, photos hang of a young Engram catching a ball on a “Y Cross” play, a drag route over the middle of the field that Ironside and Hillgrove used often in Engram’s breakout senior year. In a similar breakout senior year at Ole Miss, Harris recalled, coaches drew up six or seven plays per game specifically targeting Engram.
He put on weight from those skinnier days in high school, evolving into a muscled-up 227-pound chess piece at Ole Miss. If teams tried to cover Engram with a linebacker or play a defensive package with larger personnel, the Rebels would spread the field. If teams tried to bring in a nickelback to stifle the pass, Ole Miss would pull Engram in as a blocker and call power runs, Harris recalled.
“He was a real mismatch for us,” Harris said.
Engram finished with 65 catches for 926 yards and eight touchdowns his senior year at Ole Miss and was snatched 23rd overall in the 2017 NFL draft by the Giants. There was a “lot of buzz” in New York’s organization, former assistant Lunda Wells recalled, around the athletic Engram’s arrival. There was a lot of buzz in New York, in general. Haney and a group of still-tight Hillgrove pals would visit Engram in the city and walk around amazed as their taller-than-average buddy since fifth grade drew oohs and aahs from onlookers.
It’s Evan Engram! That’s Evan Engram!
But buzz, within a few years, vibrated with anger, his franchise stuck in purgatory.
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For six months out of 12 over the last few years, Lieberman took the fairly unusual step of moving himself and his wife to a rental property in Jacksonville five minutes away from Engram.
The tight end was coming off a Pro Bowl season in 2020 with the Giants, catching 63 passes for 654 yards. But Engram found Lieberman at a time when he “really needed guidance,” the trainer said. He had eight drops, and was consistently accosted by Giants fans for them, social-media vitriol ruthless and unrelenting.
“He’s gotta be one of the most hated Giants ever,” Lieberman said, “at that period.”
Worse, Engram read those comments. He told ESPN in 2023 it was a “stressful time going to work,” as the Giants endured losing season after losing season, and those around him noticed his love for the game had diminished. Engram is a people pleaser, as Harris put it, and few in New York were pleased. Frustration stabbed inward, until he “kinda felt defeated” coming out of New York, friend Haney said.
“He’s sitting here thinking, ‘Am I still in the game, or do I still want to play this game?’” Haney described. “‘Is all this worth it?’”
After accidentally stumbling into a group workout in the 2020 offseason with Lieberman and longtime client Sanu, though, Engram was hooked. They both studied the paths of Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, Lieberman said, beginning to lay out their own blueprint of a “lifestyle committed to greatness.” Engram and the coach started training together four days a week for three to four hours a session, talking nearly every day, reconstructing his catching mechanics from the ground up.
He committed to nutrition and recovery. Massages. Needling. Hyperbaric chambers. And he and Lieberman dove inside his mind, the coach often talking with Engram about what they call his “dark side” — his deepest motivations for greatness.
“Learning how to harness those, as like a power and a motivating force, and using it to really just drive you through to continue pushing levels,” Lieberman said.
It took years to blossom. There were drop-filled days on practice fields where they’d bark at each other. Engram had a career-worst season in his last year in New York in 2021.
He came to Jacksonville on a one-year prove-it deal, as Jaguars tight ends coach Richard Angulo said. And he proved it, turning in a solid 2022 before breaking out with a 114-catch season in 2023.
He was a player “glued in” to prove his value, Angulo said, the tight ends coach so impressed that he began to incorporate some of Engram’s personal route-running drills into his own coaching.
“You can definitely tell, nowadays, he’s more hungry than he’s ever been,” Engram’s friend Haney said. “Jacksonville, and then going to (Denver) … he doesn’t see a finish line anytime soon.”
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After a torn labrum ended his 2024 season prematurely, the Jaguars released Engram to free agency for salary-cap savings. He’d seen the playoffs once in eight NFL seasons. His top priority in free agency, as he articulated to Lieberman, was to play for a legitimate winner.
Engram has stayed in contact over the years with former Giants backup quarterback Davis Webb, now a fast-rising quarterbacks coach with the Broncos. He’d seen plenty of film on young quarterback Bo Nix, and was “impressed,” as Lieberman said. He visited Denver last Monday and, after visiting the Chargers a day later, inked a two-year deal worth $23 million with the Broncos last Wednesday.
“It’s kind of like a Super Bowl-or-bust mentality,” Lieberman said of Engram’s interest in Denver. “He hasn’t been a part of that in a long time. So, he’s just so excited to compete, and show that he can be as great as he thinks he can be on the biggest stage.”
More so, too, he’s been excited for Payton’s Joker utilization in Denver — the kind of system he’s been training for with Lieberman for years. The Jaguars shifted Engram around a variety of sets, too, and he’s drilled running routes at every receiver spot back to his time in Jacksonville, Lieberman asserted.
“I think he handles the weight, the amount of responsibility … to see how much, really, he can offer as far as where and how you can attack defenses on the field with him,” Jaguars tight ends coach Angulo said. “He thrives on that. He doesn’t want to be stuck in any kind of role. … He wants to be pushed.”
And he will be pushed, outside of any traditional box, in Denver. Just how Engram wants it. Has always wanted.
“I think it’s a good situation for him,” Angulo said, “just to see how far he can really go.”
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