Bottom Line
A 7th-round pick (256 overall) to Denver behind Evan Engram and Adam Trautman with a 7.4 RAS — this is a camp-body TE3 profile, not a dynasty asset. Avoid in all formats outside deep 30+ roster TE-premium dynasty.
Team Fit & Opportunity
Denver used the 256th pick on Bentley to sit behind Evan Engram (clear TE1), Adam Trautman, Nate Adkins, and Lucas Krull — a four-deep room before he arrived. Just 25 vacated targets team-wide signals no organic pathway to volume. Bentley's path to a 53-man is beating out Krull and Adkins on special teams and as an in-line blocker, not as a receiving threat. Realistic year-1 role: practice squad or TE4 with sub-10% snap share.
Talent Profile
The 7.4 RAS at 6'4"/260 with a 4.62 forty is a respectable Day 3 athletic profile but nothing that forces snaps. The 35" vert and 118" broad show functional explosiveness for a Y-tight end, and 24 bench reps confirm the in-line frame. Translation: this is a developmental blocking tight end with enough movement skills to be a four-phase special teamer. Utah deployed him primarily as an attached blocker, and the Round 7 capital tells you exactly how the league weighed his receiving translation — it didn't.
Strengths
- Plus size at the position: 6'4"/260 with 24 bench reps gives him legitimate Y-tight end mass for combo blocks and wing alignments in a Sean Payton-influenced run game.
- Functional explosiveness: 35" vert and 118" broad jump are above-average for a 260-pound frame, suggesting he can finish at the catch point in red-zone reps if he ever earns them.
- Special teams floor: The athletic profile and frame project to core-four ST work, which is the realistic mechanism for a 53-man spot.
Concerns
- Draft capital is damning: Pick 256 is the second-to-last selection of the entire draft — historical hit rates for receiving production at this slot are near zero.
- Buried on depth chart: Engram, Trautman, Adkins, and Krull are all ahead of him with NFL snaps already logged; even an injury to Engram likely promotes Trautman, not Bentley.
- No receiving profile: 4.62 forty is fine, but no athletic testing number screams "miscast at Utah" — the tape and the testing both point to blocker-first.
Historical Comp Read
Round 7 tight ends with sub-7.5 RAS and middling college receiving production almost universally wash out or settle as TE3/blocking specialists — think the bottom tier of the Adkins/Trautman archetype itself. The rare hits (Marcedes Lewis longevity, Ross Dwelley situational) required years of patience and specific scheme fit. Bentley's comp signal points to a 2-4 year career as a roster-edge blocker, not a fantasy-relevant breakout.
Outlook
Year 1: practice squad or TE4 with negligible offensive snaps; zero fantasy relevance. Three-year arc: best case is a Trautman-tier TE2 who logs 200-300 receiving yards in a contract year if Engram leaves and he wins the blocking job. Floor is out of the league by 2027. Catalyst: Engram departure plus a Trautman injury, in that order. Risk: ST coordinator prefers Adkins, and he never sees the 53.