How Tyler Conklin went from miserable college hoopster to an indispensable leader on the Jets

There was a Buffalo Wild Wings commercial, maybe a decade ago, where a couple of guys sit at a bar and watch the fourth quarter of a football game when one says to the other: “The only thing that would make this better is overtime.” The bartender pushes a button, activating sprinklers at the game they’re watching, knocking out defenders and clearing the path for a game-tying touchdown. Overtime.

In the fall of 2013, Tyler Conklin was watching a football game, at a Buffalo Wild Wings in Midland, Mich., when something clicked in his brain, as if someone pushed that magical button behind the bar. Back then, he looked nothing like the buff, heavily-tattooed, long-haired and fully-bearded tight end he is today. He was a skinny Division II college basketball player, close-cropped hair and clean-shaven.

And he was miserable.

Then he saw Michigan State tight end Josiah Price get open on a stick nod route in the red zone and haul in an easy touchdown catch. It clicked:

I think I can do that.

That moment helped shift the direction of an athletic career full of crossroads moments — if Conklin had changed course ever-so-slightly, he wouldn’t be here, a 29-year-old in his seventh NFL season, a crucial piece of a New York Jets team with Super Bowl aspirations, thriving with a future Hall-of-Famer throwing him passes. He’s recently married, a kid on the way.

“There’s so many things in my journey that pieced together in the right way that allowed me to be where I’m at right now,” Conklin said.

This wasn’t his dream, even if it feels like one.

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Conklin wanted to be a professional basketball player. “I had it all planned out,” he said.

When he committed to play at Northwood University, his plan was to go there, dominate, break records and then land with a professional team overseas.

“He would’ve been a hell of a player for four years if he stayed,” said Dylan Langkabel, a Northwood teammate. “But it seems like it worked out for him.”

Sean Koski, Conklin’s best friend and high school quarterback, lived eight doors down from Conklin in Chesterfield, Mich. Some nights they’d stay up until three in the morning, shooting hoops at Conklin’s house, dreams of one day making it to the NBA. Conklin always had it in his head that he’d be a professional athlete. He had the genes for it — his dad played college football, his mom played college volleyball.

When Conklin arrived at L’Anse Creuse North High, he was a lanky 6-footer, weighing 150 pounds “soaking wet” said Jay Seletsky, Conklin’s coach at L’Anse Creuse North. For his first few years, he played basketball (a point guard) and football (a wide receiver). The football team had lost all of its games for two consecutive seasons as the basketball program was on the rise.

“You start questioning your own ability a little bit,” Koski said. “I think it definitely put his back against the wall a little bit and made him wonder if he should just stick with basketball.”

The losing was tiresome.

“It wasn’t your ‘Friday Night Lights’ atmosphere” with football, Seletsky said. “We were a basketball school and he thrived off that.”

As a sophomore, Conklin grew a couple inches and was bumped up to the varsity basketball team. In the summer before his junior year, Seletsky said that Conklin “exploded” on the AAU circuit, bulked up, trained and grew to 6-3, 185. As a junior “he pretty much dominated our county,” Seletsky said. Conklin was a team captain, a combo guard and the team’s best scorer — he shot 50 percent from three and Seletsky estimates his vertical leap improved from around 20 inches to 34 inches, seemingly in a matter of months after some intensive training to extract his natural athleticism. Seletsky started running “backdoor alley oops” for Conklin, unusual for a point guard.

Powered by Conklin, the Crusaders made it all the way to the Final Four his junior year before losing to Saginaw High, a team with multiple Division I recruits, Conklin led the game in scoring and rebounding anyway. That’s when college interest intensified. He called Seletsky to say he was thinking about quitting the football team. Seletsky convinced him to stick it out. That summer, Conklin broke his hand playing basketball, which kept him from playing AAU — and that kept him from generating any real interest from the mid-major Division I teams like nearby Detroit Mercy.

“Had he not broken his hand he would’ve gotten those D-1 offers for basketball, and I don’t know if (his story) would’ve been the same,” Seletsky said.

That fall, Conklin had his best football season, earning all-state honors as he helped lead L’Anse Creuse North to its first (and, still, only) playoff win. He started to get the itch for football, but at that point he’d already committed to play basketball at Northwood, a decision he started questioning before he’d even graduated high school.

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Northwood would play its games on Wednesday and Saturday nights, and most of the team had classes starting at 8 a.m. One Wednesday night, the team didn’t return from a road trip until 3 a.m. The next morning, for a 1 p.m. practice, there was one chair sitting in the center circle at mid-court. Jeff Rekeweg, Northwood’s coach, yelled at the team to get to the baseline.

All right, I want to know which one of you guys didn’t go to class this morning?

They all looked at each other. All but a few players raised their hands. That wasn’t the response Rekeweg was expecting. He cursed and tossed the chair to the side, and yelled at the team to run sprints for the next hour. The team wondered who Rekeweg was initially targeting for the punishment.

“It was one chair,” Langkabel said. “After practice we were like, Who was it? We come to find out the only class he went to check on was Tyler’s class. He didn’t go — but neither did the rest of the team.”

Conklin was bailed out, but that wasn’t the first time he’d skipped class. It had become a recurring issue, Conklin retreating back to his dorm, glum, wondering why he wound up at this place, why he felt so miserable.

During his senior year of high school, Conklin called Rekeweg and said he was considering bailing on the basketball scholarship to pursue football, the first sign he was wavering. He reported to Northwood anyway, though his family and friends quickly figured out how unhappy he was. When he got to Northwood, about a two-hour drive from home, he thought it might just be homesickness, but he wasn’t sure. The summer before his freshman year, he found himself calling his mother everyday, telling her: I don’t want to be here. When he came back for the fall, for the season, he didn’t feel any better about it. He started to skip class.

“Everyone is telling me ‘stick it out, stick it out, you’re a freshman, that’s how it goes going to college, your first time away from home,’” Conklin said. “I went out for the first semester and I played my first seven games and I was just miserable. You could call it depressed.”

In high school, Conklin was the star and usually the best athlete on the floor. He struggled to adjust to the college game. He was the top recruit in his class, but found himself second or third on the depth chart behind upperclassmen like Darvin Ham, the son and namesake of the former NBA player who would later coach the Los Angeles Lakers. In those seven games, Conklin averaged 3.3 points and shot 25 percent from three in 13.5 minutes per game.

“I think he was at times frustrated because things that were easy in high school were more difficult in college,” Rekeweg said. “It was never a lack of effort on his part. He always tried hard and was easy to coach. He wanted to learn. He was a great competitor and in high school when we recruited him his athleticism stood out. He tried to dunk on everybody. He fit the type of athlete that I wanted and the type of character I wanted in our program to take it to the next level and to compete in our league for championships.”

Langkabel used to go to the gym after hours to shoot around and one night, sometime after that seventh game, Conklin was in there, alone, shooting around too. At one point Conklin turned to Langkabel and said: “Dude, I’m done. I’m out.”

“He kind of seemed like he was a guy who knew what he wanted to do,” Langkabel said. “He said: ‘I’m going to play football, I’m going to chase this dream, if I’m not happy here why am I going to stay?’ It seemed like he wasn’t scared to take that risk.”

He walked into Rekeweg’s office and the coach wasn’t surprised to learn the news — and he knew it wasn’t worth trying to convince him to stay. Conklin was taking a leap of faith: Quitting a full ride to go try and walk on at wide receiver at Central Michigan.

“I knew for him to walk into my office to have that conversation was already tough enough — knowing the history, it wasn’t a decision that he took lightly,” Rekeweg said. “As much as I wanted to talk him into staying because I was confident in what he could do for us, ultimately it really is what’s best for the player. It was like, hey, I get it, I hate to see you go, but I wish you the best. I hope it works out great for you.

“You can’t have the kind of success he’s had so far without being willing to put yourself out there. It doesn’t surprise me with his personality and the type of person he is, but it’s not easy. The easy thing would’ve been to stay and be safe.”

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Conklin’s family wasn’t happy. His mother called Seletsky, asking him to convince Conklin to change his mind. His grandparents were upset.

“Part of me thought it was stupid,” Koski said.

Conklin recalls his friends telling him that too. “I always truly believed I would be a professional athlete,” Conklin said. “Some of my friends would tell me when I was transferring they would say: Dude, when is he going to give it up?”

When Central Michigan said they’d bring him on as a walk-on, without any guarantee for a future scholarship, Conklin celebrated like he’d just won the lottery. Then came the hard part.

When he arrived for spring ball at CMU, coaches wanted him to play defensive end; he had to bulk up. He arrived weighing 195, got to 205 as a freshman, and then thought about leaving. Koski was headed to play quarterback at Siena Heights University, an NAIA program, and Conklin wanted to join him. He committed and his release papers were sent over to Central Michigan.

An assistant coach called him and asked to give him an hour to talk to Dan Enos, CMU’s head coach at the time. Conklin just wanted to play tight end. The assistant called back and told him: We’re going to move you back to tight end and you’ll have an opportunity to earn a scholarship here real soon.

“They could’ve been like: You’re a walk-on, you’re staying at D-end,” Conklin said.

But they didn’t. So Conklin stuck around. He bulked up to 250 pounds by the end of his collegiate career — fueled, he said, by peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and chocolate milk. He became a captain and one of the most productive tight ends in school history, finishing with 1,064 yards and 11 touchdowns combined over his final two seasons.

“If Central didn’t move him back to tight end, who knows what could’ve happened,” Koski said.

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The Vikings drafted Conklin in the fifth round in 2018 and then barely played him. He had seven targets in 16 games as a rookie. In his second season, Conklin didn’t get his first catch until a Week 11 game against the Broncos, a much-needed 20-yard reception in the third quarter of a game the Vikings fell behind 20-0 and wound up winning 27-23, a comeback jump-started by Conklin’s catch. In his third year, Conklin’s first target didn’t come until Week 10, a Monday Night game against the Bears.

Defensive end Jalyn Holmes was one of Conklin’s first friends in the NFL. They were draft classmates — Minnesota selected Holmes in the fourth round — and shared an apartment. “I was with him every day,” said Holmes, now a Jets teammate. “The first couple years it was definitely tough for him. But his attitude doesn’t change. He still attacks work the same. He attacks every day the same. He always treats everybody with love and respect so that’s honestly probably the reason why he had so much success — he stays consistent.”

Conklin never let it bother him because, in his mind, his football path was always leading to glory. He’d find his moment. In his fourth season, Conklin took off, just in time for free agency: 61 catches for 593 yards and three touchdowns in 2021.

The Jets made Conklin a priority that offseason, signing him to a life-changing three-year, $21 million contract in March 2022, hoping to fix a position that had been a problem area in New York for many years. During his first two seasons in New York, Conklin was often a steadying, consistent presence as things were crumbling around him on offense — especially at quarterback. Over two years, he caught passes from Zach Wilson, Mike White, Joe Flacco, Chris Streveler, Tim Boyle and Trevor Siemian. He had zero touchdowns in 2023, his quarterbacks sometimes not seeing him break open down the field. And yet, he was seventh in receptions and 10th in yards among all tight ends over those two seasons. He never complained or demanded the ball. And often, as the Jets offense struggled to get going, week after week, the losses piling up, Conklin was standing in the locker room, facing the media, searching for answers.

Behind the scenes he was a voice of reason, a steadying presence in a locker room that could’ve easily splintered as the offense consistently failed to carry its weight for an elite defense. When the offense conducted a players-only meeting late in the season, Conklin was one of the veterans who stood up and spoke. He’s on the Jets’ leadership council for a reason.

“He’s an elite human,” Jets coach Robert Saleh said. “Obviously he wants the ball, but he’s never going to beg for the ball. He’s going to do his job. He’s going to do it 100 percent … It was good to see him get rewarded on Thursday night (against the Patriots), to get that production — because we think … he’s everything you want out of a Jet.”

Added Holmes: “He’s doing what he’s capable of doing. It’s a beautiful thing to see.”

The first two weeks, even with Rodgers, Conklin was largely ignored: two catches, four targets, 16 yards. Then he had his best game in a win against the Patriots on Thursday Night Football last week, a career-high 93 yards on five catches. All but one of his five catches went for first downs. His connection with Rodgers — they’ve shown flashes of it in training camp the last two years — is buzzing.

“I just feel like it was destined. Everything has happened for a reason,” Conklin said. “My opportunity to play in this league came when I was most ready for that opportunity in my contract year. Being a walk-on and going through all that at a young age — it allowed me to understand how to make the most out of not a lot of opportunities … A lot of things happened the right way for me and the opportunities came when I was most ready for them.”

(Top photo: Cooper Neill / Getty Images)