There’s a new member of the Detroit Lions offense as OTAs wrap up in Allen Park this week. The Lions signed veteran tight end Devin Funchess on Tuesday.
Yes, tight end. The Lions themselves made the distinction in their media release announcing they’ve signed Funchess.
Michigan Wolverine fans probably recall Funchess as a wide receiver, the position he played in Ann Arbor from 2012-2014. He was also a wideout in his prior NFL stops with the Carolina Panthers and Green Bay Packers, but that designation probably deserves an asterisk.
Funchess always played wide receiver with some of the skills that easily translate to tight end. At 6-4 and 215 listed pounds at Michigan, he had the size to play a hybrid role. College recruiting services ranked Funchess as a tight end coming out of Harrison High School in suburban Farmington Hills. His quickness off the line, or relative lack thereof, is much more akin to a tight end than the D.K. Metcalf or Mike Evans of the oversized WR world.
During the 2015 NFL draft process, many teams asked Funchess to work out as a tight end. He wound up being drafted by the Carolina Panthers in the second round, No. 41 overall.
Carolina kept Funchess at outside wide receiver and he had an interesting tenure with the Panthers, who listed him as a 232-pound wide receiver.
As a rookie, Funchess was a big part of the Panthers offense. While he caught just 31 passes for 473 yards and five touchdowns, he was second on the team in WR targets, catches and yards. That was the run-heavy Carolina team with Cam Newton in his MVP season that made the Super Bowl, where the primary passing target was tight end Greg Olsen.
The Panthers rarely asked him to play anything like a TE. In his most productive season, the 2017 campaign, Funchess aligned as an inline tight end exactly 11 times per Pro Football Focus. Nearly 80 percent of his snaps in his four seasons in Carolina came as an outside wide receiver, not in the slot or inline.
That 2017 campaign was an illuminating one for both Funchess and the Panthers. He led the team’s wide receivers in every statistical category (Christian McCaffrey dwarfed them all at RB) and caught more than 50 percent of his targets for the first time. But his inability to get separation and his pedestrian run-after-catch ability hamstrung the Panthers offense to some extent. He was gradually phased out of the starting lineup and down the WR rotation in 2018, with the team leaving him inactive in two key games down the stretch of a playoff push. The Panthers didn’t have any problem letting him hit free agency
Those qualities that weren’t dynamic enough at wide receiver should translate better at tight end for Funchess. Based on a recent Instagram post he made, the 28-year-old appears to have embraced fully bulking up to handle the more advanced physicality of playing tight end.
We have to rely on Instagram posts because we haven’t seen much of Funchess since he left Carolina for Indianapolis after the 2018 season. He broke his collarbone in Week 1 for the Colts and never played for Indy again. He bounced to the Packers for the 2020 season, but Funchess chose to opt out during the COVID-19 pandemic. Playing exclusively at outside WR in the 2021 offseason for the Packers, Funchess didn’t make it out of the preseason after suffering a hamstring injury.
The reinvention as a full-fledged tight end is a savvy gamble on the part of Funchess. The best attributes he showed as a wide receiver could help him find greater success playing TE: big target, enthusiastic (if not always effective) blocker, reliable route runner.
If he’s healthy, Funchess joins what figures to be a very active competition for the TE spots behind Pro Bowler T.J. Hockenson in Detroit. He’ll compete with veteran blocker Garrett Griffin and young receiving-oriented TEs in second-year players Brock Wright and Shane Zylstra, as well as fifth-round rookie James Mitchell.
