Tight end Colston Loveland unlocks Michigan football's offense — and its high hopes

Randy Moss grew up in Rand, West Virginia. Jerry Rice grew up in Starkville, Mississippi. Great football players can come from anywhere — even Gooding, Idaho, with a population 3,500 located in the shadow of the Snake River, awash in high-desert scrub and infinite sky, home of potentially Michigan football’s best tight end, well, ever.

So say his coaches.

And lately, so says Colston Loveland’s play.

“Freak athlete,” head coach Jim Harbaugh said.

“Immense amount of ability,” said Grant Newsome, his position coach. “He works like he isn’t the best tight end in the country.”

Whether Loveland is or isn't yet is beside the point. Because he has the talent to be the best. And that ascension could change how we think of U-M's offense, not to mention its trajectory.

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Yeah, a tight end is only as good as his quarterback. But a tight end can help make a quarterback, too, and make an offense, for that matter, when the receivers are solid but not especially explosive (particularly on the outside).

Roman Wilson is a fine playmaker. Cornelius Johnson gets more consistent by the week. Against the best defenses, though, a team needs a difference-maker who catches passes, but that difference-maker doesn’t have to be a traditional receiver.

Kansas City won the Super Bowl last year with Travis Kelce as its best ball-handler (after Patrick Mahomes, obviously). New England did the same for years with Rob Gronkowski, who was Tom Brady’s preferred target.

Georgia won consecutive national titles with defense, yes, but also with a tight end as its best receiving option. Brock Bowers will be a first-round pick next April when the NFL draft hits Detroit. This could be Loveland’s path the year after, following his junior season.

Look, Loveland is only a sophomore, and he isn’t Moss or Rice or Kelce or even Bowers. But he’s a reminder that football players sometimes come from unlikely places, and sometimes don’t arrive with a contrail of hype.

Colston was somewhere in between. He was overlooked — for reasonable reasons — early in his high school career but then snuck into the Top 500 recruiting lists by the time he signed with U-M. Enough coaches saw enough promise that offers from Alabama and LSU eventually came.

He stuck with the Wolverines, and Harbaugh, and Jay Harbaugh, who both showed up in Gooding one day and became a happening. Loveland and the Harbaughs clicked.

Ask Harbaugh the Elder about his tight end now, and he’ll shake his head at the possibility.

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“I’ve been thinking this for well over a year now: he’s really great,” Harbaugh said Saturday after U-M beat Rutgers, 31-7. “I think the cat's out of the bag. For a minute there, I was just thinking, ‘You know what? He doesn’t know how good he can be. He doesn’t know how good he is.' Kind of always thought that maybe the longer that takes him to figure that out, the better off he’ll be.”

Loveland doesn’t question his own ability or his place in big-time college football. He just makes plays, more by the week. A skinny post down the seam. An out pattern down the sideline. A sit-down on third down, where he acts as a release valve for J.J. McCarthy.

It helps that he’s 6 feet 5 and long, with catcher’s mitts for hands. It also helps that he runs routes like a veteran receiver, and runs free like a receiver — which makes sense, because that’s the position he played most in high school.

Then he grew, and grew some more; even though he lines up as a tight end and is learning to block like a tight end, he moves fluidly out in space.

Saturday against Rutgers, he helped double a defensive end to spring a long Blake Corum run, he caught a 35-yarder down the edge after a flea-flicker, and he high-pointed a catch deep over the middle for 28 yards.

A contested catch. A spectacular catch. A catch many tight ends don’t make. Certainly not previous tight ends at U-M, which is why his coaches think he can be the best who has ever suited up in maize and blue.

“He’s a true football player,” Harbaugh said. “There’s nothing better you can say about somebody.”

Except maybe that he is a good teammate. Harbaugh had a story about that, too.

“We had a play at Ohio State last year,” he began. “He caught that touchdown pass at Ohio State and then he comes sprinting back from the goal line to where we were all huddled up there as coaches. I’m getting ready to do something, chest bump (him) … something. He was coming back to get back on the kickoff team. Didn't want to be late for that. I said, ‘Hey, take this rep (off). We'll get somebody else out there for this one.’ ”

Loveland doesn’t run from praise. He’s comfortable with it. But mostly thankful for it, because he knows it means he’s running toward bigger things.

“I just love that guy for gassing me up, for sure.”

As mentioned, Loveland has a good idea of how good he is and how good he can be, and he knows that without dominant wideouts, the space is there for him to propel the aerial attack.

For U-M to get where it wants to go, he’ll need to own it.

Contact Shawn Windsor: 313-222-6487 or swindsor@freepress.com. Follow him @shawnwindsor.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Michigan football's offense hits a high when Colston Loveland clicks