To this day, Mike Lohner doesn’t quite know where his nephew found the money. Or the parts. Or why, really, he decided to rebuild a 1960s-era van from scratch, in the summer of 2021.
The why has always seemed less important than the how, with Caleb Lohner.
“There are those people that plan out their life,” Mike said. “And there are people that sort of go where life leads them.”
Life led a younger Caleb Lohner, before his sophomore year of hoops at BYU, to getting his hands on a vintage camper. He fixed up the engine. He redesigned the interior. The hours faded, and Lohner once rushed to a summer workout at BYU with oil grease smeared across his cheeks.
“Caleb, what?” BYU assistant coach Chris Burgess recalled asking him then. “Go wash your face off.”
“I tried,” Lohner replied. “It’s all over the place.”
This is how the now-Broncos rookie has always been. A “beautiful kid,” Burgess called him. Lohner plays guitar and surfs. He preferred hopping in Utah’s Provo River to hopping in ice baths in the training room at BYU. He would plop himself down in Burgess’s office, in his couple of years there, and chatter on about topics much broader than sports.
They would eventually talk about sports, because the 6-foot-7 Lohner could barrel through a brick wall and jump higher than 40 inches. For his entire life, Lohner believed he had a future in basketball. But Burgess, who spent a decade playing basketball overseas and another decade coaching, often told Lohner he’d make a good tight end in football.
Everyone told him that, really. Forever. On a recruiting visit for Utah basketball, Utes TEs coach Freddie Whittingham — a longtime family friend — half-joked to Lohner he should come out for football. He shrugged it off.
But as a college hoops career wound down at Baylor, Lohner paused. He told his uncle that he had a deep belief he was meant to make a difference in sports. And so, in May 2024, Lohner transferred to Utah to play football.
One year later, a kid who had four catches — whose family had no idea how to go about any kind of draft process — signed an NFL contract. The pivot from college basketball to pro football was exceedingly complicated. The reality was simple.
Lohner wanted to do it. And so he did.
“It’s like, ‘Of course I’m playing football — this is what I do, and this is what I’m working on,’” Burgess said. “He’s not a worrier. He’s not an overthinker. He just gets things done.”
On April 26, before the 241st pick in the seventh round, Sean Payton called Lohner to tell him the Broncos were taking him. He added a sales pitch, too, based on one of his all-time success stories with the New Orleans Saints.
“Hey, you ever heard of Jimmy Graham?” Payton asked Lohner, as his Uncle Mike recalled. “We’re going to make you the next Jimmy Graham.”
Lohner just nodded along for the ride, like he’s always done.
“Caleb, of course, said, ‘Yeah,’” Mike Lohner recalled. “‘Let’s do it.’”
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The Graham comparison wasn’t a shock. Or new. Far from it.
That comparison has followed Lohner ever since he arrived in Denver — ever since the night he was drafted, when Payton brought up the former Saints stud unprompted when asked about Lohner.
Lohner, for his part, has mostly shrugged it off.
“I try personally not to hear it,” Lohner told The Denver Post in May. “Just because I’m on my own journey, how I’m learning.”
That journey, though, started with a look at Graham. Whittingham, Utah’s tight ends coach for a decade, grew up with Lohner’s father in the same neighborhood in Provo and was sold for years on the kid as a future NFL pro.
After a disappointing two years at Baylor that saw him receive limited minutes despite team success, Lohner finally called Whittingham and told him he was considering the transition. So Whittingham, eventually, sat Lohner and Uncle Mike down for a PowerPoint presentation.
On one slide, Whittingham put a picture of former All-Pro Graham with a side-by-side physical comparison to Lohner. Graham came into the NFL at 6-foot-6 and played four years of college basketball before switching to football. He recorded just 17 catches his senior year. Lohner stood at 6-foot-7, Whittingham pointed out, and played four years of college basketball.
“I just was saying, ‘They’re looking for guys with traits like you,’” Whittingham said.
Utah’s long been a breeding ground for NFL tight ends. In the past four years, four Utes TEs (Cole Fotheringham, Thomas Yassmin, Dalton Kincaid, and now Lohner) have cracked pro rosters. Lohner put himself on a path to becoming the fourth when he decided to jump to Salt Lake, arriving at Utah at the end of summer workouts in 2024.
He missed spring ball. He hadn’t played organized football since eighth grade. Staffers had to literally teach Lohner how to put his pads on, at first, as Utes head coach Kyle Whittingham recalled.
He wound up barely seeing the field. Behind the scenes, though, a grizzled Utah staff saw a gem.
“I really believe that they’ve got themselves something with Caleb,” Kyle Whittingham said. “And not to take anything away from all our other guys, because really, we like all those guys as well.
“But Caleb’s kind of an anomaly.”
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In one practice in BYU’s 2020-21 season, Burgess was coaching on the baseline in a team period when Lohner — the team’s leading rebounder as a freshman — barreled over big man Kolby Lee to crash the glass.
Lee, a 6-foot-9 mountain of a junior, didn’t take too kindly to Lohner’s aggression. Peeved, he came roaring in after an offensive rebound to try to knock him on his behind. Bruise for bruise.
Except Lohner didn’t even budge, Burgess recalled. Didn’t even recognize it was a cheap shot.
“He just like, stands there,” Burgess recalled, “and kinda looks at him like a bug hit him.”
The BYU assistant still marvels over Lohner years later, telling the tale of another time he tried swiping down to dislodge the ball from Lohner and wound up with a fractured finger.
“I know these sound like Bo Jackson-type stories,” Burgess said. “But he has this athletic ability and this strength that’s really, really powerful.”
Lohner’s game was fit for football. None of it was finesse. He high-pointed rebounds, smacked guys around and dunked. It translated, in his short stint at Utah, to four touchdown grabs in red-zone packages.
Still, Lohner entered the draft process this offseason as a near-complete unknown. Utah’s collective ended up giving him an NIL package to play basketball in 2024-25. Lohner used it to pay for pre-draft training. Uncle Mike, a longtime entrepreneur who’d built the Cowboys Golf Club in Dallas, consulted longtime Cowboys executive Stephen Jones for advice.
Eventually, Mike wound up pleading his nephew’s case to a couple of agents. Jack Bechta, who’s repped numerous NFL tight ends, took a meeting with Lohner in Salt Lake City and came away impressed enough to refer him to colleague Jack Tabb.
“After looking at how he could play basketball,” Tabb recalled, “I was like, ‘(expletive), I’d be more than happy to help you.’”
Tabb was once an NFL tight end himself, latching on briefly with the Saints during Payton’s tenure. And once or twice a week, for half a year, he’d hop on Zooms with Lohner and break down an NFL playbook. And blocking schemes. A crash course, in real time, of how to play pro football.
There is little expectation that Lohner will contribute for Denver in 2025. Much of the intrigue around Lohner is projecting — a word Payton tossed out after the Broncos drafted him. But he took plenty of pass-catching reps in minicamp, and Payton said in June the rookie was “coming around.”
True to form, Lohner has little expectation for the future, Uncle Mike said. Wholeheartedly focused, for now, on simply making it past cut day in late August.
Others, though, are leveling the expectations for him.
“I just think,” said Utah defensive coordinator Morgan Scalley, “he’s a future star in that league.”
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