Tyler Warren wears No. 44 to honor John Riggins — and the comparisons don't stop there

INDIANAPOLIS — When Tyler Warren was a kid starting out in football, his father showed him some old footage of John Riggins and gave him a message: This is how I want you to run the ball.

That’s why, even though he played tight end at Penn State, Warren wore No. 44 to honor the Hall of Famer known as one of the more physical and intimidating ballcarriers in NFL history.

Of course, before Riggins famously wore that wrecking ball number for Washington as a Super Bowl MVP — which undoubtedly is how he came to the attention of the Warren family of Mechanicsville, Virginia, about a two-hour drive from the nation’s capital — he wore it for the Jets, the team that drafted him with the sixth overall pick in 1971.

This year the Jets currently hold the seventh overall pick, which isn’t an exact match for the numerology buffs making the Riggins comps, but it might be close enough to entice them to select the player who models his skills after him and plays a position of need for the team . . . assuming, as many do, that Tyler Conklin will leave in free agency.

Warren is one of many options the Jets likely will have when they get on the clock in late April, and certainly one of the most exciting. After being used sparingly for the first three years of his career at Penn State, Warren won the John Mackey Award as the nation’s top tight end in 2024 after catching 104 passes for 1,233 yards and eight touchdowns. He also ran 26 times for 218 yards and four scores, making him one of the more dynamic playmakers in college football and a potential multi-tool weapon for NFL play-callers.

At a position that generally has two very different ideals — the massive Rob Gronkowski type and the fleet, shifty Travis Kelce type — Warren straddles both worlds, even if his 6-6, 261-pound frame allows him to play on the line of scrimmage more than some of his lighter counterparts.

“He just walls guys off,” NFL Network draft analyst Daniel Jeremiah said. “He looks like a billboard rolling down the seam. He’s enormous. He has a huge catch radius. He is so physical and tough with the ball in his hands after the catch. They use him on the Wildcat stuff and use him as a runner and do those different things because he’s a really hard guy to get on the ground.”

“What I try and do is be a guy that can kind of fit in a lot of different roles,” Warren said on Thursday. “I don’t know if I have one that really sticks out the best. That’s kind of the fun thing about the tight end position; you get to do a lot of different things within the offense . . . I think I can do a lot of different things, so whatever the offense needs from week to week and what they want my role to be is what I’ll do, and that might change from game to game.”

Warren said he hasn’t had specific conversations with teams about how that might look . . . yet. “But I think we’re all on the same page,” he said.

Riggins isn’t Warren’s only football influence. He said he began studying former Giants tight end Jeremy Shockey last summer. Warren said “the way he kind of played and his mentality running the ball was something I kind of liked and tried to do a little bit this year.”

Clearly there is also an aesthetic from Shockey that landed with Warren, as his long blond hair flowed out from beneath his league-issued ski cap on the podium on Thursday morning.

Warren also rattled off a few other present-day tight ends whom he admires, most of them the usual list of George Kittle and Travis Kelce  and last year’s rookie record-setter at the position, Brock Bowers.

Warren's mentors included Theo Johnson, the Giants’ fourth-round pick last year and the player who kept Warren on the bench for most of his career in Happy Valley.

“We have some similarities and we have some differences,” Warren said of Johnson. “Theo is as athletic a tight end as you’ll find. Runs really great routes and is really a fast guy. He might be a little higher up on that scale and I do a little more of everything. He helped me out and I can’t say enough good things about what he’s meant to me through my process.”

That process is almost ready for its next phase.

Whether it’s to the Jets or elsewhere, Warren figures to be a very high pick in this draft and become a very important player for somebody’s offense. Jeremiah ranked Warren as the fifth-best prospect in the draft.

That wasn’t always the case.

“When I first started playing football, [getting to the NFL] was something I wanted to do, obviously, what my goal was,” he said. “Getting to college, I wasn’t too sure my first year. I had a little bit of growth to do from the physical aspect of it.

“By the middle of college, when the coaches sat me down and said I would have an opportunity, and what that would look like, I still had a few more years, but I kind of realized I might have a chance to actually extend my career and have the opportunity to play in the NFL.”

His father gave him the jersey number and the mentality years ago. Now that chance is here for Warren to use both of them.

By Tom Rock

tom.rock@newsday.com@TomRock_Newsday

Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.