Former BYU basketball player Caleb Lohner is coming back to Utah, but not in the way you might expect.
Lohner is switching sports and will play on to the University of Utah football team this season.
He attended Utah’s spring game last month. Head coach Kyle Whittingham will try to utilize the 6-foot-8, 230-pound athlete in a different way next fall.
Lohner spent the last two years on Baylor’s basketball team. He averaged 2.4 points a game in just under 10 minutes for head coach Scott Drew.
Before moving to Waco, Lohner was a starter for BYU’s basketball team under Mark Pope. While he came in as one of the better shooting big men, he averaged just seven points a game and around six rebounds. He made 44 starts in two years.
Lohner played part of his high school basketball in Utah, too. While he is from Flower Mound, Texas, a suburb in the Dallas area, he transferred to Wasatch Academy for the final stretch of his career.
Interestingly, Lohner is not the first Baylor basketball player to try his hand at football. Mark Vital Jr., a center on Baylor’s 2021 national championship team, tried to play in the NFL after he graduated.
He never made an official roster, but did spend a few years in the Seattle Seahawks and Kansas City Chiefs organizations.
