Eli Stowers arrived in Eagles camp with real buzz, but the first week-plus has been more grind than glow.
Through six practices, the second-round tight end has yet to make much noise. He’s not spending heavy time with the first-team offense, and the explosive traits that helped convince Philadelphia to take him No. 54 overall in the 2026 NFL draft haven’t shown up consistently yet.
For a player who dominated the SEC a year ago and earned the label of college football’s top tight end, the early returns have been rough. If Dallas Goedert is the long-term picture, Stowers looks like he may open his rookie year as TE3.
Stowers isn’t pretending otherwise. After Wednesday’s practice, he pointed to the mental side of the transition as the biggest hurdle.
“The biggest adjustment, I’d say, has probably been the mental challenge,” Stowers said after Wednesday’s practice. “The offense and the way the defenses do their schemes at this level, it’s a little more complex than it was in college.
So that’s a challenge. But it’s just about putting the time in and learning it and trying to get better with it.”
When asked about dealing with frustration, he kept the focus on resilience.
“At the end of the day, this is a game where there’s going to be ups and downs, and you’ve just got to learn how to bounce back from adversity,” Stowers said. “No one who has ever played this game has ever been perfect. And the ones who are great are the ones that can bounce back from the adversity and go make the next play.”
That kind of response fits the path that brought him here. Stowers was a quarterback at Texas A&M just four years ago before an injury limited his ability to throw and pushed him into a position change. He transferred to New Mexico State, started learning the tight end position there, then moved on to Vanderbilt.
By 2024 and 2025, he was producing big numbers for the Commodores: 111 catches, 1,407 yards and nine touchdowns. In his third year at tight end, he won the Mackey Award and helped turn Vanderbilt from an SEC bottom-dweller into a team that could make life difficult.
So the issue in camp isn’t that Stowers can’t learn the position. He already proved he could do that in college.
The problem now is the jump to the NFL, where the speed, the scheme work and the blocking demands have all hit at once. Philadelphia is installing a new offense, and the practices have come against one of the league’s best defenses.
That’s a tough classroom for any rookie, especially one still building his tight end foundation.
Stowers says he’s leaning on the veterans around him, including Goedert and Johnny Mundt, to speed up the process.
“Playing with guys who have been in the league for 10 years, learning from them, they have so much experience, so much knowledge, so much wisdom. They’ve taken me in and tried to help me,” Stowers said of Goedert and veteran tight end Johnny Mundt.
“I’m trying to learn from as many people as I possibly can who have been in the league for a while,” Stowers added. “Because there’s a learning curve at this level. And I’m trying to get over that hump and get to the point to where I can be the best that I can be.”
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