DENVER — He glanced down the line, a tunnel of silence around the 40 yards in front of him, and the realization that he was here suddenly smacked Gunnar Helm.

A long way, truly, from the Denver neighborhood Cherry Creek— in Indianapolis, a thousand miles and several years removed. A long way from the kid who couldn’t crack varsity for a couple of years, who was a stone’s throw away from calling his playing career over. He dug his hands into the turf and released a deep breath, mouth forming an "O" as he exhaled. But the jitters still shook him, a false-start whistle blowing on his first 40-yard attempt at February’s NFL combine.

Helm slowed. He braced to turn back to the start line on his right foot. And his ankle popped.

It was only afterward, when Helm took his shoe off in a conversation with agent Jack Bechta, that the damage revealed itself. The thing had ballooned. Purple splotches spread. There was no long-term danger, but this hurt in the short term, a handful of NFL teams wanting to get a time on the 6-foot-5 tight end from Texas.

In the moment, though, Helm barely grimaced, back for a second try. No one noticed. He didn’t want them to. And so it was, a few seconds later, that the kid from Cherry Creek ended up running his official 40-yard dash on a sprained ankle.

“Being able to be on that stage, on national TV, and being able to have these Colorado kids and all these Creek kids and all the kids that want to be where I’m at — to be that guy,” Helm recalled, “there was no way I was pulling myself out of any of those drills. No matter how bad the injury was.”

Helm finished with a time of 4.84 seconds, 12th out of 14 TEs at the combine. His draft fate teetered somewhere in the middle rounds, and Helm was crushed. I just killed my stock, he lamented to Bechta. Perhaps, the agent reflected, it would indeed knock Helm down a round in April.

But within 24 hours, as pictures of Helm’s ankle inconspicuously made their way to NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport, Bechta realized he could sell this. Well, it sold itself.

This was Gunnar Helm. Never any excuses. Never any fuss. He waited his turn back at Cherry Creek, and waited his turn at Texas, and grew in the shadows of weight rooms and practice fields into a player few could’ve ever quite anticipated. He played every single game at Texas for four years, through swollen knees, swollen shoulders and swollen ankles.

He wouldn’t pull himself out on a sprained ankle, he’s told teams since, in predraft meetings. He would tape it up. He did it at the combine, after all. He has the eyes of Colorado to live up to.

“That’s who he is,” Texas tight ends coach Jeff Banks said of Helm. “He ain’t gonna miss anything. That dude’s not missing anything.”

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Back in his day, Blake Helm played football at Cherry Creek High School with a kid named Gunnar. Something about the name stuck in his head for years. And when he and wife, Patti, were preparing to welcome their son, Blake tried rolling the name Gunnar Helm around out loud, bellowing as if he was manning the Cherry Creek loudspeakers.

On the reception for the Bruins, Gunnar Helm!

Two decades later, Helm’s parents sat in the stands at DKR-Texas Memorial Stadium and rarely heard their son’s name called early on. Helm caught 19 passes his first three years as a Longhorn. The Helms went, for years, to cheer Gunnar’s blocking.

Then, in Week 2 last fall, on a trip to Michigan, his parents watched in Ann Arbor as Gunnar caught a ball. And another. And another. Each subsequent grab prompted a look in the stands from his parents, Blake and Patti, turning to each other incredulously.

“‘Did he just catch another one?'” Blake recalled thinking. “We weren’t used to that.”

Nobody was, really. Nobody expected this. Banks and Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian believed in Helm, sure; they didn’t expect him to catch 60 balls. One Texas writer, Helm recalled, predicted he would catch nine passes his senior year.

“I mean, I had nine catches after my second game, so,” Helm said. “It was a little bit of, like, a gotcha.”

Despite being deployed every game as a blocker, Helm had been stuck behind future Panthers TE Ja’Tavion Sanders for three years at Texas. Sure, he was frustrated. But he didn’t rail at his program; he railed at himself. After Sanders declared for the NFL draft following the 2023 season, Helm went to Banks and demanded that he hold up a mirror at him.

“I said, ‘I want to win the SEC. I want to win a national championship. And I want to play in the National Football League. What do I have to do to get there?’” Helm recalled.

“And he said, ‘You’ve gotta be stronger. You’ve gotta be faster. And you need to be a lot better in the vertical passing game, and you need to be a lot better after the catch.’”

Helm trained in triple-digit heat in Nashville, Tenn., with TE guru Jeremy Holt for a week in the offseason. He ran routes religiously with quarterback Quinn Ewers, preparing himself as a safety valve. He drilled his explosiveness in weight room one-on-ones with Texas strength coach Torre Becton.

Months later, he finished with 786 yards and seven touchdowns in 2024, rounding into one of the better tight ends in the nation. He hurdled multiple guys in multiple games. He averaged 7 yards after the catch, Texas’ tight-end room long drilling a concept Sanders called “YAC Season.”

There was no secret here. There was only a chip that Helm had slapped on his own 6-foot-5 shoulder pads, ever since his days at Creek. It took until his junior year to make varsity, when coaches Dave Logan and Det Betti saw a glut at wide receiver and decided to shift Helm to tight end. He entered Texas as an “underdeveloped” — as Banks put it — 220-pound baby face, the lowest-rated member of Texas’ 2021 class beyond punter Isaac Pearson.

And he wore Colorado on his sleeve, a region Logan says is “severely under-recruited.”

Helm wanted to leave another standard for the Denver region that molded him.

“Just to show people … who may have been in my position coming out of high school, that, you can still do this and you can still be a great, and you can still play to the highest of your ability at the highest level, no matter where you’re from,” Helm said.

“If you’re good enough, they’re gonna find you.”

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In early April, Helm sits in a locker room at Landow Performance in Centennial, reflecting. He’s long proven to himself that he’s good enough. But he didn’t necessarily expect to be here, a few weeks away from a potential Day 2 or early Day 3 selection in the NFL draft.

But the cart had been pushed this far. He doesn’t intend to stop. He rattles off the names of idols he wants to be peers: Travis Kelce, George Kittle, Tony Gonzalez, Antonio Gates, Rob Gronkowski.

“I want to be on that level,” Helm says, firm. “I want to leave a blueprint on football. I want to leave a stamp on whatever community I get brought into. And I want to be known as someone who helped change and develop the tight end position in the NFL.”

The 40 time hurt. The combine results paint a shoddy picture. The tape illustrates something else. Holt, who’s trained TE stars Kittle and T.J. Hockenson, compares Helm to fellow client and Pro Bowler Zach Ertz. Coaches point to his ability to check every box after playing in a pro-style offense at Texas — vertical game, yards after the catch, blocking, football IQ, durability. The only true question is whether he’s got 4.60- to 4.70-second speed rather than the 4.84 time he posted at the combine.

“We get less calls on him,” said Banks, whose Texas program has roughly 15 draftable prospects in 2025, “just because everybody’s like, ‘Yep, that’s what we thought.'”

Helm will likely end up picked somewhere in the middle rounds, with a handful of potential destinations. The Rams, for one, are so interested that they sent a scout to Creek for a background check. The Broncos, too, hosted Helm on a local visit. He was teammates at Texas with special-teams coordinator Darren Rizzi’s son Christian and is roommates with a family friend of new Denver QB3 and former Longhorn Sam Ehlinger.

“They call it the Denver Longhorns,” Helm said, “so if I could be that next Longhorn to come in and help the Broncos win games, it’d be a great honor.”

Whether or not he ends up with the Broncos, Denver can still claim Helm, a prospect who claims the city right back. He didn’t tap out at the combine, he told his father, because that wasn’t who he was. He also didn’t tap out, he said, because he never saw many Colorado kids at the NFL combine growing up.

“I think for this area,” Cherry Creek coach Logan said, “it’s a real feather in the cap of high school football in Colorado, right?”

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