Philadelphia Eagles: Greg Dulcich is a perfect Day 2 weapon

The Philadelphia Eagles are a team in need of reliable offensive weapons.

They have a few mind you, with DeVonta Smith looking like a perennial Pro Bowler, as does Dallas Goedert, and players like Miles Sanders, Quez Watkins, Boston Scott, Zach Pascal, and even Kenneth Gainwell looked primed to be steady contributors for the Birds in 2022 at the very least, but behind that those players, there really isn’t as much depth as a team with eyes on the playoffs would like.

I mean goodness, in 2021, 48.7 percent of the Eagles’ receiving production came from two players, Smith and Goedert, and outside of Watkins, the team didn’t have another player who even reached the 300 receiving yard mark in a season where Jalen Hurts and Gardner Minshew threw for 3,585 yards. Both players rarely took advantage of the entire field due to a combination of Nick Sirianni’s flood-heavy play calling and the dubious contributions to the offense by players like Jalen Reagor and JJ Arcega-Whiteside, and opposing defenses were able to take advantage of that in a variety of different ways.

Now granted, the addition of Pascal should help, as he’s a pro with more experience being coached by Sirianni than any other player on the roster, but the presence of a 6-foot-2, 214-pound possession receiver isn’t going to magically right the Birds’ offensive ship. No, the team needs legit difference-makers who can beat their man in coverage one way or another and provide Hurts with easy completions to offset the run game and set up more longer-developing plays down the field.

Would a player like London Drake, Treylon Burks, or Chris Olave help with that plight? You bet, but a team doesn’t win by wide receivers alone. No, with Zach Ertz an extended member of the Arizona Cardinals, Tyree Jackson down with a knee injury suffered back in January, and Jack Stoll a pretty big question mark heading into his second professional season, the Philadelphia Eagles would be wise to draft a big-time tight end capable of contributing right out of the gate and forming a long-term tandem with Dallas Goedert. Enter Greg Dulcich, the UCLA tight end Chip Kelly once compared to a certain tight end out of Stanford.

The Philadelphia Eagles could use a big-bodied target like Greg Dulcich.

When you watch Greg Dulcich take the field for the UCLA Bruins, the first thing you notice is his hair. It’s long, flowing, and that certain kind of wavy/curly you’d expect to see from an LA-bred prospect born in Glendale and educated in Westwood. But once the ball gets snapped, the hair takes a backcourt to Dulcich’s unique ability to pick up yards down the field, as he might just be the best pure receiving tight end in this year’s class.

Measuring in at 6-foot-4, 243 pounds with a 122-inch broad jump, a 7.05-second 3-cone drill, and a 4.69 40 yard dash time, Dulcich walked on at UCLA and slowly worked his way up the hierarchy of Chip Kelly’s offense, going from a player who recorded one reception for six yards as a freshman to the offensive focal point of a Bruins offense that ranked first in the PAC-12 in points per game.

Paired up with fourth-year quarterback Dorian Thompson-Robinson, who is opting to return to Westwood for a fifth season due to the NCAA’s COVID-19 eligibility amendment, Dulcich proved capable of attacking the entire field, ranked second on the team in touchdowns at five, and led the team in yards per reception at 17.3, which ranked second among tight ends behind only UAB’s Gerrit Prince. He deployed on the line, as an H-back, or as a supersized slot receiver a la another former Kelly favorite, Jordan Matthews, and formed an elite one-two tandem alongside Kyle Philips, who has a chance to hear his name called at the tail end of Day 3 of the 2022 NFL Draft.

Dulcich, by contrast, likely won’t make it to Day 3, as he has a pretty good chance of hearing his name called within the first 100 picks in a tight ends class without a true marquee talent.

If transplanted into the Sirianni’s offense, Dulcich would immediately slot in as the Eagles’ second-string tight end and play 600-ish snaps as both a fixture of the team’s 12 personnel grouping and moonlighting as a change of pace big slot who could fish for mismatches while running all of the same routes at Quez Watkins. While he was more often called upon as a receiver than a blocker during his four-season run in Los Angeles, Dulcich has great size, a big frame, and the potential to become more than just a joker tight end specifically called upon to attack down the field as he develops along as a pro. With that being said, there’s little reason to believe Dulcich couldn’t immediately contribute as a rookie and contribute 300-plus yards of offense as a receiver, which, again, only three players on the team were able to muster in 2021.

Do you ever wonder what it would have looked like if the Eagles kept Zach Ertz all season in 2021, and he would have been available at the end of the season when the team was in desperate need of another offensive player? Well, Dulcich might just be the next best thing.

When a walk-on player makes good and becomes a featured player on their college team, it’s a special thing. It shows toughness, determination, and a will to prove doubters wrong, which bodes well for their long-term success in life, either in the world of sports or elsewhere. While Greg Dulcich isn’t a finished product offensively and may never become an All-Pro caliber player, his UCLA tape jumped off the screen because he consistently found ways to impact the game down the field and make his quarterback’s life easier. Now, if that doesn’t sound like the kind of player the Philadelphia Eagles should target on Day-2 of the draft, then I don’t know what is.