Eyeballs Emoji Needed: Packers Attend Incredibly Surprising Pro Day

Tyson opened his career at Colorado in 2022, when he missed the end of the season with a knee injury. He transferred to Arizona State for 2023 and missed most of the season because of that injury. He took flight the last two seasons, though. He was a third-team All-American in 2024, when he caught 75 passes for 1,101 yards and 10 touchdowns in 12 games. In 2025, he was first-team all-conference even while a hamstring injury limited him to nine games. He caught 61 passes for 711 yards and eight touchdowns.

Injuries are a significant issue, though. Along with the knee injury in 2022 – the dreaded triple-whammy of a torn ACL, MCL and PCL – he suffered a broken collarbone late in the 2024 season, missed most of the spring in 2025 with an ankle injury and he was sidelined for the end of last season and the draft process with the hamstring.

Why would the Packers show up for the workout of a player there is a 99.9999999999 percent chance they won’t be in position to draft?

Well, for what it’s worth, the Packers could package this year’s second-round pick and next year’s second-round pick and get into the bottom of the first round. They could use their second- and third-round picks in this year’s draft and get toward the top of the second round, if Tyson were to fall.

More likely, though, it’s due diligence.

“Absolutely,” Gutekunst said at the Combine of scouting players who would have been in range had they not traded away the 20th overall pick in the Micah Parson blockbuster. “We met with a couple last night in some of our interviews, specifically understanding that where we sit right now, it’s probably unrealistic.

“But there’s things we needed to get to the bottom of and wanted to know that were important for us, whether that be for this draft or three, four, five years from now.”

A player’s college scouting report will follow him throughout his NFL path. So, it’s important to do the work, just in case Tyson is available in a trade in a couple years or available in free agency in five years.

“The process is kind of still the same as far as what we’re doing and how we’re going through it,” Gutekunst said. “I think it’s important that we don’t skip any of those steps just because we don’t have a first-round pick, because that doesn’t mean we won’t have a first-round pick. You really can’t say that we won’t.

“Not only that, but I think getting to know these players inside and out, whether it be for this draft or going into free agency and their professional career is really, really important for us, so the groundwork that our scouts do on these players in college really does carry over quite a bit into our pro scouting staff and how we look at these players.”

At 6-foot-2 1/8 and 203 pounds, he’s got the size the Packers covet. He’s excellent in contested-catch situations, with 17 catches out of 31 opportunities the last two seasons, according to Pro Football Focus.

“Tyson's superpower is being open even when it looks like he's completely blanketed,” Kiper wrote. “It makes him essentially uncoverable in the red zone. He wins on 50-50 balls and outmuscles defensive backs.”

Importantly, he cut his drops from seven (8.5 percent) to one (1.6 percent).

“For sure, surprised myself,” he said at the Scouting Combine. “But I'm just a person that gets better every year. I feel like ever since I was a little kid, I just got better every year, every year. I was a late bloomer. Just continued to get better, get better and just start catching these people that were above me for a long time and, shoot, did surprise myself.”

He’s well-coached, too; his position coach at Arizona State was former NFL star Hines Ward. His biggest takeaway was learning “the everyday pro habits,” Tyson said.

Athletics is in the DNA. His father, John, played college football at Florida A&M. His older brother, Jaylon, was a first-round pick by the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2024.

“That's all we do is compete all day long,” he said. “I was the baby too, so they was never taking it easy on me. They was actually making it a little harder, and I had to work two times as hard to win. But just compete all day every day. We're going to ball, we'll go do anything, golf, all that.”