Ball State football has a massive void to fill at tight end with the departure of Tanner Koziol, and the Cardinals prioritized the position in the transfer portal as a result.
Ball State will kick off its season on Saturday, Aug. 30, with an in-state road game at Purdue. They are coming off a 3-9 season and hasn’t qualified for a bowl game since 2021, but new head coach Mike Uremovich will look to lead a quick turnaround.
With the season less than three weeks away, we’re breaking down the Cardinals’ roster position by position. Here’s our breakdown of the Ball State football tight ends.
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Ball State added four tight ends from the transfer portal following the departures of Koziol in the winter and Christian Abney in the spring.
Redshirt senior Drew Cassens was one of three Butler Bulldogs to follow Uremovich from Indianapolis to Muncie, while fellow redshirt senior Koby Gross joined the Cardinals by way of Florida A&M in the spring. Ball State also added Tate Hoover from Hutchinson Community College and Ben Dutton from Washington State along with Gross in the spring, but the veterans seem to be in line for the biggest role of the four.
Gross was a second-team all-SWAC tight end last season with the Rattlers and spent time at Florida State before his three years in Tampa. He has an established rapport with quarterback Kiael Kelly and has quickly embedded himself in the tight end room despite only a few months in Muncie.
“We’re a close group,” Gross said. “We met a lot over the summer, five or six hours a day, so we got really close and we have so much versatility in the room. We all match each other.”
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Cassens joined the Cardinals in the winter as a graduate student. He only caught 10 passes for 126 yards last season with Butler, but has impressed as a blocker throughout training camp. He provides more experience with a similar blocking archetype to Hoover, a redshirt sophomore from the JUCO level who helped Hutchinson CC win an NJCAA national title. Cassens was complimentary of the younger tight end and his offseason work.
“Tate Hoover’s a really gritty guy,” Cassens said. “Coming from a junior college, he kind of had to learn the ropes a little bit at first, but he’s figured it out now; I mean, he’s rolling. He does a great job getting his questions answered. He doesn’t go onto the field without knowing exactly what he has to do, and I think that’s a testament to what we do in the meeting room.”
Ball State did hold onto a handful of tight ends from last season, but they are mostly young and inexperienced. Redshirt freshman Kameron Anthony has been impressive throughout camp, drawing a fair share of first-team reps and looking like a true weapon with great athleticism in his 6-foot-4, 251-pound frame. As a young player, the veteran presences of Gross and Cassens have been assets in his continued development.
“They’ve been in the game for so long, and I’m still young, just learning how to approach, how to attack practice everyday, and then how to kind of have a veteran’s mentality when it comes to it,” Anthony said.
Redshirt sophomore Maximus Webster is another young player who could play his way into the rotation. He earned snaps as a redshirt freshman with appearances in all 12 games and caught a touchdown, but he was injured in the season opener of 2024 and granted a medical hardship waiver for an additional year of eligibility.
The Cardinals also return redshirt junior Jackson Constantine and redshirt sophomore Leo Collins, who saw some playing time at the end of last season. For Constantine, tight end will be the third position he’s played for Ball State — he experimented on the offensive line last season after spending his first three years at linebacker. The Cardinals also welcomed a high school recruit in 6-foot-5 Mason Riggins out of Zionsville.
Tight ends coach Sean Chase — another former member of Uremovich’s Butler staff — has been impressed with the group’s work so far, but wants to see more consistency in the details as the season draws closer.
“A lot of our guys are doing stuff right once, maybe twice, but it’s consistency every single time,” Chase said. “It’s not until you get it right a few times but until you can’t get it wrong.”
Contact Cade Hampton via email at [email protected] or on X, formerly known as Twitter, @CadeHamp10.
