The legend of Tyler Warren: How Penn State’s tight end became the best in school history
Matt Gray leaned back in his seat with a smile on his face. The Atlee High School football coach has sat front row to many of Tyler Warren’s accomplishments, but he hasn’t seen them all for himself. Yes, he coached him for four years and watches him on Saturdays when he plays tight end — and a bunch of other positions — for Penn State.
But there are still some things that he’s not sure are myth or reality.
“Hear me out,” Gray said as his smile broadened. “It’s been told that one time a ball was hit over that fence and hit the train. I wasn’t there, but that’s the legend.”
The train tracks run across the street from the baseball field behind the Mechanicsville, Virginia, high school. It’s far from home plate — Warren estimates it’s in the low 400s of feet away — especially far for any high schooler.
Warren laughed when he was asked about it.
“I hit the tracks, but I won’t go as far as to say I hit the train,” he said.
Those are the kinds of stories that develop when you’re as talented as he is. Eventually you accomplish so much that the things you do become legendary, and grow a life of their own.
Warren reached that status as a high schooler and has done it again at Penn State — establishing himself this season as one of the best weapons to ever take the field as a Nittany Lion.
Becoming a high school football legend
It’s easy for people who see someone that talented to embellish a story here or there, or add extra details. But with Warren, most of them are true.
Like when he got a walk-off hit off a future MLB Draft pick before he ever got to high school. Or how he, as an eighth grader, told Gray he would show him how tough he is. Or the windmill dunks in pick-up games. Or how he guarded a five-star big man recruit and a four-star shooting guard as a high schooler — and shut both down.
There are plenty of tales like those about Warren, and Gray is more than happy to share all of the football ones.
The Atlee head coach took the job and was quickly on the lookout for a quarterback, and got instructions on where to find one.
“One of the guys told me, ‘your quarterback is next door at the middle school,’” Gray recalled. “I was like, yeah I get it. Thank you. And he was like, no, I’m serious. The kid is playing basketball right now and he’s dunking in games.”
That was the beginning of what would become a storied high school career. Warren went on to become a dynamic threat for Gray and it’s clear that he had an impact on his former coach.
Gray sat down to talk about Warren in his small office at the back of Atlee High School, with a fridge in the corner, snacks on the table and a TV on the wall. Before he shared the stories about his former player, he had an idea, putting on Warren’s high school football highlights as a backdrop to the conversation.
So there he sat, answering questions about Warren, with an occasional pause in his response to describe a highlight. And that’s how he unveiled one of those stories.
While speaking about his former quarterback and how low-maintenance he was, Gray became distracted by what was happening on the TV. Warren ran a successful fake punt, knifing through the middle of the defense. That brought an obvious question for Gray to answer — why wouldn’t the defense immediately recognize it was a fake? After all, the starting quarterback was lined up to punt the ball. Although, he probably could have punted, too.
“All-state as a punter,” Gray said with a wry smile.
Dominating in other sports
Warren’s successes in high school didn’t stop on the football field. He was an elite basketball player, too. Atlee boys’ basketball coach Rally Axselle has some of those stories.
Warren dominated other players on the court. And it didn’t matter what position they played or how highly touted they were.
“His junior summer, we were playing summer league,” Axselle told the CDT. “Tyler was guarding (then five-star recruit) Efton (Reid). Efton scored five points. He banked in a three and then made a little layup. ... He can guard Efton Reid who’s 6-11 and then the next game he’s guarding (then four-star recruit) Joe Bamisile, 6-4, dynamic scorer. That’s the thing people don’t understand. People can’t do that. People shouldn’t be able to do that.”
Reid is currently the starting center at Wake Forest and Bamisile is a starting guard for VCU.
But if you ask Warren for his favorite athletic accomplishment in high school, it isn’t locking up opponents or dunking on defenders — something he also did with a high frequency — but it was what he wanted since he was younger.
“The one thing I really wanted when I was in middle school, going into high school, was to be on the 1,000 point banner for basketball,” Warren said. “That was the one individual thing where I was like, that would be really cool if I had my name up in my high school with the rest of the 1,000 point scorers.”
Warren was so good on the court — he did end up getting on that banner — that Axselle remains surprised that some school didn’t come around and offer him the chance to play both basketball and football in college.
And you can probably lump baseball in, too, because Warren excelled on the diamond much like he did on the hardwood and in pads. He may not have hit that train, but he did crush plenty of baseballs. He jokes that he never hit as many as he could have that far because he would always swing as hard as he could until he got two strikes, then had to choke up and try and put the ball in play.
In those big moments, that’s what he did, even before he became who he is now.
George Bland coached against Warren in high school and his son played against the Penn State tight end growing up in a variety of sports.
That’s when Warren once again showed off his talent.
“We were competing against him,” Bland recalled to the CDT. “The kids were 12 or 13 years old, and it was an extraordinarily competitive game. And it came down to the bottom of the last inning, and they were down by a run, two outs, two strikes, and Tyler Warren delivers a game-winning walk off hit to win the championship against a kid who is now playing professional baseball. I always knew Tyler was extraordinarily special. But rarely did he have to face situations in tight games, because he was always winning by so much. And this was kind of the first time I saw that and and he delivered.”
Taking it to the next level
Most of those stories about what Warren did in other sports went away when he got to Penn State. But not all of them.
Center Nick Dawkins — son of one of the greatest dunkers of the NBA in his time, Darryl Dawkins — said Warren had no issue showing off those basketball talents when it became necessary.
And you can argue about the necessity of it, but sometimes Dawkins, Warren and former Penn State left tackle Olu Fashanu would team up to run pick-up games against the general populace of Penn State students.
And sometimes Warren had to ruin somebody’s day.
“He can shoot, he can dunk, he can get rebounds,” Dawkins said. “He’s a serious athlete. He’s a super athlete. I just recall a lot of random students having a bad day. Probably trying to come out and shoot some hoops at Martin (Hall), play a couple pick-up games — and getting windmill dunked on as a freshman welcome.”
Just because you were a teammate — or potential teammate — of Warren’s, it didn’t mean you couldn’t be had on the court. New York Giants tight end Theo Johnson, who counts Warren as one of his best friends, was teammates with him for four seasons at Penn State.
Johnson says Warren likes to tell the Efton Reid story to everybody, but added that on occasion he had to show he still had it on the court.
“I remember when Andrew Rappleyea and Joey (Schlaffer) were just recruits, we had them up in the summer,” Johnson told the CDT. “They were playing pick-up and they’re young guys trying to prove themselves and stuff. Both of them, on different occasions, tried to go up and dunk on Tyler during a game. And both of them got denied — like, ball went on the opposite end of the court.”
Emerging into stardom
Rappleyea and Schlaffer are now teammates with Warren and have had a front-row seat to the highlights he’s now putting out there for the world to see. But the highlights reels weren’t the start of what has been a breakout season for him. Instead it was a non-conference game against Bowling Green that got the ball rolling.
Before that, he wasn’t at the top of the scouting report for opponents.
“Going into the game, it was Drew Allar, it was the running back, they had a couple receivers that were high recruits coming out, then they had this tight end that was in the backdrop, at least for us, of Drew Allar, the offensive line, the run game,” Bowling Green co-defensive coordinator Sammy Lawanson told the CDT.
It didn’t take long for Lawanson and the rest of the Bowling Green staff to realize they were watching the start of something.
“It was the first drive,” Lawanson recalled. “They ran a play where they flooded it to the boundary. They hit him on one play there. He got another play a little bit later going the other way on a key third down. We had a zero blitz. Our free safety missed the tackle on him. He breaks it. He goes for another 20 yards. It was just explosive play after explosive play after explosive play.”
And by the end, the co-defensive coordinator knew he was seeing something special.
“Warren just killed us,” Lawanson said with a laugh. “When we left the game it was, damn, the tight end is really effing good. The tight end is really, really good. ... It seemed like after our game he just took it to a complete other level and built on what we had done in our game and kept it going.”
Lawanson was right.
Warren kept going, and going, and going. Against USC he caught 17 passes (a Penn State record) for 224 yards and a touchdown — which he scored on a play where he snapped the ball and made a leaping grab over a USC defender. Against Maryland he broke Penn State’s career receiving touchdown record for a tight end (17) and the Big Ten’s single-season receptions record for a tight end (81). Then he eclipsed 1,000 receiving yards against Oregon in the Big Ten title game and broke the Big Ten receiving yards record for a tight end in a season.
That doesn’t even account for the passes he’s thrown as a wildcat quarterback or the big gains he’s made as a runner or the dives over the top of the pile to score rushing touchdowns. Or his Mackey Award win as the best tight end in the country or seventh place Heisman Trophy finish.
Warren has broken record after record while doing things that have never been seen before by a player at his position.
But those will not be the last records to fall, and these will not be the last stories to be told, about the best tight end to ever play at Penn State.
This story was originally published December 19, 2024 at 6:30 AM.
