Devin Funchess was at his home in Florida in early June when he got a phone call with an interesting proposition.
The Detroit Lions wanted to know if Funchess, who had been out of football since being cut from the San Francisco 49ers practice squad last December, was interested in changing positions to tight end, a spot he hadn’t played since his freshman season at Michigan football in 2012.
Funchess was waiting on calls back from a handful of NFL teams who had worked him out as a wide receiver, but the more he thought about the Lions’ offer the more excited he became.
Playing tight end wasn’t that different from playing receiver, and at 6 feet 4 and 235 pounds, many viewed him as a hybrid of the positions anyway.
More importantly, after a strange three-year football odyssey, returning home to play for the Lions gave Funchess a chance to pay back the people he cared about most.
“My main thing is my family,” Funchess told the Free Press this week. “To play in front of my family and not have to have them travel, I’d do anything for them so that’s my main thing. It came into being the greatest team player and then also caring about my family.”
A second-round pick by the Carolina Panthers in 2015, Funchess had an up-and-down first four seasons in the NFL. The former Farmington Hills Harrison star started in the Super Bowl as a rookie and led the Panthers with 840 yards and eight receiving touchdowns in 2017, but never topped 44 catches in any other year.
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Still, Funchess played well enough to sign a one-year, $10 million contract with the Indianapolis Colts as a free agent in 2019, and as a 25-year-old ticketed to be the top red zone target for Andrew Luck, many believed his career was about to blossom.
Luck shocked the NFL by retiring a few months later, however, and Funchess’ descent into football purgatory began when he broke his collarbone on his 36th snap of the Colts’ season-opening loss to the Los Angeles Chargers.
“It was kind of a whirlwind having Andrew Luck retire on me,” Funchess said. “I went there basically for him. Turned down other opportunities and a lot more money to go play with him so that was kind of a mental strain on me for that whole year. But at the end of the day, you’ve got to look at the positive and not the negative, and when I got hurt, you can’t control the collarbone and healing from that.”
Funchess, who considers his time in Indianapolis a blessing now — he used his big NFL payday to open a bar he named after his daughter, Peyton, in Idlewild, one of the first Black resort towns in the United States, and make other investments — signed a prove-it deal with the Green Bay Packers in 2020 before opting out of that season because of COVID-19 concerns.
Funchess said his grandfather, James Hester, and grandmother, Gail Hester, spent 17 and 11 days, respectively, on ventilators early in the pandemic and other family members died after bouts with COVID, though he declined to share details of their illnesses.
Raised by his grandparents, Funchess said he opted out of the season to protect his family. James Hester lives with Funchess in-season at times, and Funchess was not comfortable with the NFL’s COVID protocols.
Left to workout in relative isolation in 2020, Funchess became briefly disenchanted with football. He stopped watching games and wondered if he was done with the sport while “training just to train” with no payoff in sight.
“I was dark,” Funchess said. “I was in a deep, dark place and it was something that I wouldn’t wish upon anybody, and it was something that I had to — I got baptized in 2020 just to find a true purpose. Dec. 21, 2020, just to find my true purpose and I understand that I wasn’t blessed with all these gifts that I have to give up and to stop. That’s not my mentality. Like we say in Detroit, we’re built Ford tough.”
Funchess said he snapped out of his funk after a visit from his cousin, Aden Holloway, a prep basketball star in North Carolina who recently committed to Auburn.
Holloway visited Funchess’ Florida home during the pandemic and coerced his cousin to get back on the basketball court. Funchess said playing competitively again — he and his cousin played with former NBA star Michael Beasley, among others, who he had trained with previously — reignited his passion for basketball, which in turn “gave me a different love for what I truly was great at, and that was football.”
To satisfy his competitive juices, Funchess dabbled in a number of activities during the pandemic. He played soccer and learned to play the piano, picked up chess, got back on the track and started doing gymnastics.
Working with a gymnastics teacher, Funchess learned how to better control his body and gained more spatial awareness, which helped reset his mind coming off his collarbone injury.
“I’ve been doing trampoline, I’ve been flipping into the foam pit on the floor. I do my backflips, my back tucks and my front tucks and add a little twist into it,” he said. “Gymnastics is balance and body control so if you can learn how to do that and not be scared to fall, that’s the biggest thing that I wanted to do just having these shoulders. So learning how to fall and learning how to do like cool stuff in the air and the mentality that you’ve got to have, I understood what Simone Biles thinks cause if you’re not in the right proper mental, you can’t do the flips that you want to do.”
Funchess found the right state of mind by adopting what he calls his “Olympic mindset.” He began training in Fort Worth, Texas, last year with a group of sprinters and hurdlers, including two-time Olympic gold medalist Dalilah Muhammad.
Being around athletes who “wait four years to run 10 seconds” gave Funchess a fresh outlook on his time away from football.
He signed a reconfigured contract that included a significant pay cut to stay with the Packers in 2021, but was released with an injury settlement after hurting his hamstring in training camp.
Funchess, who was out of football last fall until signing in November with the 49ers’ practice squad, where he lasted two weeks, said he has no regrets about opting out of the 2020 season, though he wonders if teams held that decision against him.
“I mean, obviously they say they’re not going to hold it against you but obviously they held it against me and a prime example, (49ers GM) John Lynch said there’s nothing wrong with your athletic ability at all, it’s just we don’t think you understood what it took to go from the practice squad to the main roster,” Funchess said. “And I don’t know what that means, but I went out there and performed the way that they wanted me to at wide receiver and I had to deal with things like that.
“So it’s just hearing those type of things and going through what I went through just like you hate to see it but it obviously happens to people. … It is what it is, but I don’t have a regret at all. It’s just the story God wrote for me and he wouldn’t have gave me this challenge if I wasn’t built for it so I’m going to just keep going to it and having fun.”
In Detroit, Funchess is competing for a back-end roster spot at one of the Lions’ most wide-open positions.
Lions coach Dan Campbell said he’s looking for three tight ends for his room, a blocker to complement starter T.J. Hockenson and an all-purpose player for the No. 3 job. Brock Wright and Garrett Griffin are the favorites for the blocking role, while Shane Zylstra and fifth-round pick James Mitchell are among others vying for the final spot.
After a recent practice, Funchess spent about 15 minutes working with undrafted rookie receiver Josh Johnson and newly-signed running back Justin Jackson, drilling them on the finer points of releases and route running. Mitchell said Funchess has bounced questions off him, too, trying to master his new position.
Funchess has not played a regular season game in more than 1,000 days, but he said coming back home could be a storybook restart to his career.
“It’s rookie year all over again,” he said. “I got veteran wisdom in the game, but as far as the tight end position it’s just rookie year all over again. I’m writing down everything that I need to know, the calls that I need to make depending on alignment of the D-end or (linebacker) or anybody lined up over me. So it’s just learning those intricacies is the biggest part for me, so I’m just taking it like a rookie approach.”
Contact Dave Birkett at dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @davebirkett.