Hunter Henry With the Los Angeles Chargers: Five Seasons, Too Many Injuries, and a Career That Could Have Gone Differently
From Little Rock to the Second Round
Hunter Henry was born in Little Rock on December 7, 1994. His father, Mark Henry, played offensive line for the Arkansas Razorbacks from 1987 to 1991 and later became a pastor. The family moved to Atlanta in 2000, then back to Arkansas for high school, where Hunter attended Pulaski Academy – which, notably, runs a spread offense that has no tight end in it. He played wide receiver, defensive end, and offensive tackle there. Tight end was something he learned in college.
At Arkansas he became one of the best in the country at it. Three All-SEC selections, back-to-back bowl wins (the 2014 Texas Bowl, then the 2016 Liberty Bowl over Kansas State), and the 2015 John Mackey Award as the top tight end in college football – 51 catches, 739 yards, zero drops recorded that season. He declared after his junior year. The Chargers took him 35th overall in 2016, first tight end off the board, ahead of players the league had followed for four years. He signed a four-year, $6.38 million deal with a $2.84 million signing bonus.
2016: Eight Touchdowns as a Rookie, and the Last Play in San Diego
The Chargers put Henry behind Antonio Gates on the depth chart to start his rookie year. That didn’t hold. By Week 4, against New Orleans, he caught his first NFL touchdown on a 20-yard pass from Philip Rivers. By October 13 he had six catches, 83 yards, and a TD in a win over Denver. He finished 2016 with 8 touchdowns – third-most by a rookie tight end in NFL history at that point, trailing only Rob Gronkowski’s 2010 season and Junior Miller’s 1980 campaign. His catch rate was 67.9%. His per-target efficiency, per Net Expected Points models, ranked second among all tight ends with at least 50 targets. He was more efficient than Gates, more efficient than Greg Olsen, more efficient than most of the names people actually discussed that year.
The final game of the 2016 season was also the final game the Chargers played in San Diego before the franchise moved to Los Angeles. Henry caught a 12-yard touchdown pass from Rivers in the fourth quarter of a 37–27 loss to Kansas City on January 1, 2017. He was 22. It was, as the scoreboard confirmed, the last touchdown scored by a San Diego Charger. Nobody planned it that way.
2017: Strong Season, Hard Stop
He played well in 2017. Touchdowns against Philadelphia, the Giants, Dallas on Thanksgiving, Cleveland. Rivers was comfortable throwing to him in traffic, on seam routes, in the red zone. Henry’s Reception NEP per target that year was 0.85, second among all tight ends – the only player ahead of him was Rob Gronkowski. He caught 45 passes for 579 yards and 4 touchdowns in 13 games before a Week 15 knee injury against Kansas City ended his season. The next day the team announced it was a lacerated kidney. He went on injured reserve December 19.
Through two seasons, the numbers made a straightforward case: when Henry played, he was among the top two or three tight ends in the NFL by efficiency. The counting stats were modest because he missed games, but the per-play production was legitimate. Philip Rivers’ passer rating improved when targeting Henry versus any other Charger. That’s not a small thing for a team that finished 9-7 and lost a wild card game to the Patriots – a tight end leaving early hurt the offense in specific, measurable ways.
2018: The Season That Didn’t Happen
Henry tore his ACL in OTAs in May 2018. Not in a game. Not in training camp. In organized team activities in the spring, months before the regular season. The Chargers placed him on the physically unable to perform list July 27 and he never played a snap that year.
2018 was supposed to be the year. Gates was finally stepping back, the team was building around Rivers and Melvin Gordon, and Henry was going to be the unquestioned starter at tight end on an offense that the previous two years had ranked among the top five in the league by efficiency. Instead, Virgil Green and Lance Kendricks combined for 12 catches all season. The Chargers went 12-4 anyway, won the AFC West, and beat the Ravens in the wild card round before losing to the Patriots in the divisional round. Henry watched from the sideline in a playoff game his team was genuinely capable of winning further.
2019: He Came Back, and He Was Still Good
Week 1 of 2019, he suffered a tibial plateau fracture in his left knee. Different knee, same general outcome: six weeks out. The Chargers started 1-5 without him. He came back for Week 6 against Pittsburgh and had 8 catches, 100 yards, and 2 touchdowns in a 24–17 loss – a loss, but a statement game for a player who’d missed most of two seasons. He finished 2019 with 55 receptions for 652 yards and 5 touchdowns, career highs at that point. The Chargers still finished 5–11. Rivers threw 20 interceptions. The offense that had ranked in the top five two years earlier wasn’t the same unit, and Henry’s numbers, good as they were, came on a team that was unraveling around him.
His yards per target in the first seven games of the season when the Chargers went 1-6 were 6.95 – mediocre by his standards. In the games he played healthy, that number was back above 9. The discrepancy isn’t random; it tracks almost exactly with how the Chargers played around him. He was the one consistent thing on that offense by the end of the year, which is a fine thing to be and also not quite enough.
Slot Rate, Red Zone Usage, and What Made Henry Different
At 6-foot-5 and 249 pounds with a 4.67 40-yard dash, Henry sat in a physical range that used to mean power blocker with limited route tree. He wasn’t that. His slot rate with the Chargers was 33.4%, ranking seventh among all tight ends by 2020 – ahead of Austin Hooper, ahead of T.J. Hockenson, one spot behind Mark Andrews. He ran in-breaking routes, worked the seam, and ran enough of a route tree that defensive coordinators couldn’t simply cover him with a linebacker and move on.
The blocking side of his game was real too, which matters for a tight end on a team that ran the ball with Melvin Gordon and later Austin Ekeler. He wasn’t asked to block on every play the way an inline-only TE would be, but he wasn’t a liability in run game either. Chargers coaches in 2019 and 2020 specifically cited his ability to function in two-TE sets as something they’d built into the offense.
The Antonio Gates comparison is worth sitting with for a second, because it says something about what the Chargers had. Gates was a basketball convert who became arguably the greatest receiving tight end of his generation – 955 career receptions, 11,841 yards, 116 touchdowns. Henry was never going to replicate that production. But Henry’s per-target efficiency in his first two healthy seasons was measurably better than Gates in those same years. Gates was better as a volume receiver; Henry was better per touch when he played. Whether that means Henry was better is genuinely unclear. What’s clear is the Chargers went from one elite tight end to another without a gap – they just didn’t get to see what Henry looked like for a full, uninterrupted run.
Philip Rivers, Then Justin Herbert
Rivers threw to Henry for four seasons. The chemistry was real and statistically legible: Rivers’ passer rating when targeting Henry was consistently above his overall season mark. Henry ran precise routes, caught what Rivers threw, and understood the offense at a level that let Rivers trust him in third-down situations. Rivers said publicly in 2020 that Henry was one of his most reliable targets. That was Rivers’ last year with the team before he signed with Indianapolis.
In 2020, Justin Herbert took over as a rookie and the offense rebuilt around him. Henry had his best counting-stat season: 60 receptions, 613 yards, 4 touchdowns, career-high 93 targets. His slot usage increased. The offense was live in a way it hadn’t been since 2017. Henry and Herbert played eight games together before Henry went on the COVID-19 reserve list December 24. He was back for the final week. The full version of that partnership – Herbert with a healthy Henry for a full season – never happened in Los Angeles. Herbert eventually got Keenan Allen back and added Gerald Everett. But the 2020 partial season was enough to suggest what had been possible.
The Franchise Tag and What It Said About the Chargers’ Thinking
The Chargers placed the franchise tag on Henry in March 2020. He earned $10.6 million on the tag that year – fair money for a tight end, and also a clear signal that the team valued him enough not to let him leave cheaply but not enough to offer a long-term deal. After the 2020 season, he hit unrestricted free agency for the first time in his career.
In March 2021, he signed a three-year, $37.5 million deal with the New England Patriots. The Chargers had drafted a tight end, Tre’ McKitty, in the third round of the 2021 draft. They moved on, which they were entitled to do, though it’s worth noting they spent five years franchising, tagging, and cautiously managing a player who was one of the two or three best tight ends in the NFL per snap – and who left when the quarterback he’d spent four years building a connection with finally had a full season behind him.
Henry talked about leaving in October 2021, when the Patriots traveled to SoFi Stadium to play the Chargers in Week 8. “It was bittersweet,” he said, via NFL Network’s Mike Giardi. “The relationships we built there, separating from them.” He had caught a touchdown in each of the previous four Patriots games heading into that matchup. New England won.
What Five Seasons in LA Actually Added Up To
In 55 games across five seasons, Henry caught 196 passes for 2,322 yards and 21 touchdowns as a Charger. He never played a full 16-game season. The injuries – lacerated kidney in 2017, torn ACL in 2018, tibial plateau fracture in 2019 – weren’t clustered around one bad year. They came in sequence, each one resetting a trajectory that had been genuinely upward. By the efficiency metrics that matter – yards per target, Reception NEP, red zone conversion rate – he was elite when available. By the counting stats that drive public perception and contract negotiations, he looked like a good player who’d never quite broken through.
On the franchise’s all-time tight end list, he sits behind Gates comfortably and ahead of everyone else. That’s probably the right place for him. He came in as Gates’ replacement and played well enough to deserve the comparison while being a different kind of player in a different era of offense. The injury pattern is the thing people keep coming back to, and it’s legitimate to wonder what a version of Henry who played 16 games in 2018 and 2019 would have become in Los Angeles – different contract situation, maybe a different 2020 dynamic with Herbert. The actual version was still very good.
He signed a second contract with the Patriots in March 2024 – three years, worth up to $30 million. In the 2025 season he set a career high with 768 receiving yards and 7 touchdowns in 17 regular-season games, his first full season since 2022. He went to the Super Bowl with New England in February 2026. His 47 career touchdowns tie him with Hall of Famer Ozzie Newsome on the all-time tight end list. None of that happened in Los Angeles, which is maybe the cleanest summary of his Chargers tenure: everything it suggested he could be, he eventually became somewhere else.
Comments