Throughout the 2025 NFL season, SB Nation’s Doug Farrar will write about the game’s Secret Superstars — those players whose performances might slip under the radar for whatever reasons. In this installment,
we focus on Los Angeles Chargers tight end Oronde Gadsden II, who has taken his father’s lessons to heart about how to become an important part of an NFL team, even when nobody thinks you can.
Wide receiver Oronde Gadsden wasn’t exactly a household name when he came into the NFL in 1995. An undrafted free agent out of Winston-Salem State (one of 15 NFL players to come from that school, with the most notable alum being former Chargers, Steelers, and Titans receiver Yancey Thigpen), Gadsden managed to catch 227 passes on 407 career targets from 1998 through 2003 for 3,252 yards and 22 touchdowns. He also caught Dan Marino’s final touchdown pass, albeit in a 62-7 Divisional Round demolition at the hands of the Jacksonville Jaguars.
But the elder Gadsden had to go through three years of purgatory before he got his chance — before that, there were unsuccessful stints with the Dallas Cowboys, the Steelers, and the Frankfurt Galaxy of the World League of American Football before a 93-catch season with the Arena League’s Portland Forest Dragons (no, really) in 1998 got the Dolphins’ attention.
Gadsden’s son, Oronde II, went similarly under the radar, though he went to a bigger school (Syracuse), and he didn’t have to run through alternate leagues, playing for teams with Led Zeppelin lyric names. Gadsden II was the ninth tight end selected in the 2025 draft, and he had to wait until the 167th pick in the fifth round before the Los Angeles Chargers handed in the card with his name on it.
Gadsden had been the most productive tight end in Syracuse history, and his background as a former wide receiver set the 6’5, 236-pounder up pretty well in Jim Harbaugh’s and Greg Roman’s passing game. The debits that took him to the fifth round were more about in-line blocking, his height and weight, and whether he’d be able to deal with next-level defenders in traffic.
Little did anybody know…
Gadsden didn’t have any offensive snaps in the Chargers’ first two regular-season games, but when he got opportunities, he certainly made the most of them. Over the Chargers’ last three games, concluding with the team’s 37-10 blowout of the Minnesota Vikings last Thursday night, Gadsden has 19 catches for 309 yards and two touchdowns. That yardage total makes Gadsden the third tight end since at least 1970 to gain more than 300 in a three-game stretch, along with Kyle Pitts of the Atlanta Falcons, and Brock Bowers of the Las Vegas Raiders.
As Pitts was the fourth overall pick in the 2021 draft, and Bowers was the 13th overall pick in the 2023 draft, to have a 167th overall pick playing at this altitude is quite something.
Moreover, Gadsden is doing all of this from multiple deployments in the formation, and with multiple routes. He’s proven to be an all-in asset in that regard pretty quickly.
“He’s just super-talented,” Harbaugh concluded of his rookie after the Vikings blowout, in which Gadsden caught five passes on five targets for 77 yards and a touchdown. “The thing that strikes me the most is that he plays like he’s been playing in the NFL for two, three, four years. He seems like a four-year, five-year player to me. I’m sure that Mr. Gadsden and Mrs. Gadsden have poured that into him, and with his dad playing, you could probably connect the dots there that he’s been in the league his whole life. That’s how he plays. That’s how he approaches everything that he does in the meeting environment [and] the training environment.
“Even after he had a couple good games early, he kept saying, ‘I have to keep going, coach. I have to keep pushing.’ That’s been well-coached into him and well-parented into Oronde, and it bodes well for the Chargers.”
Quarterback Justin Herbert had no trouble agreeing with Harbaugh’s positive assessment.
“As soon as he got here for camp, we knew he was going to be pretty good,” Herbert said post-game. “He made a ton of plays, picked up the offense really quickly, and just found a way to get open. That’s what he did tonight, and we’re definitely going to get him the ball as much as we can, because good things happen when he gets it.”
The Chargers next play on November 2 against the Titans, who currently rank sixth in Defensive DVOA against tight ends. So, that could be a battle beyond what one might expect from Tennessee’s defense. But if there’s one thing Oronde Gadsden II has proven in his brief NFL career to date, it’s that he’s not to be dismissed or underrated under any circumstances.
Any defense that does so will come to regret it.
