After four seasons as a defensive lineman at SMU, Andy McCleneghen hopes to get a chance to play professionally, either at outside linebacker or tight end (photo by PonyFans.com).

For football players across the country, Pro Day amounts to the first job audition of their lives. Campuses are overrun by swarms of NFL scouts who bring their notebooks, smartphones and stopwatches to measure, weigh, time and test draft-eligible players. Some of the players are well-known commodities, all-conference honorees whose careers have been played out on TV and in newspapers (OK, make that websites), while others are little-used reserves who barely made a ripple at their school but are living out a dream of mustering a once-in-a-lifetime performance and catching the eye of a scout or two.

Most of the players, of course, are somewhere in between — starters and stars, speedy skill position players and bruising linemen, offensive weapons aimed at the end zone and defenders bent on protecting it.

Andy McCleneghen is taking a different approach to Pro Day, which takes place Wednesday at SMU. After playing for four seasons at SMU as a defensive end and nose tackle, McCleneghen will try to impress prospective employers at a new position … or two new positions. When the scouts arrive on the Hilltop to inspect McCleneghen and the rest of the SMU seniors, he will be listed as a tight end or linebacker. Or both.

The position switch “was my idea,” McCleneghen said, “just because of the fact that that’s more my body type, and my skillset fits tight end better than defensive end because defensive ends in the league are like 290, 300 pounds, whereas a tight is usually like 6-5, 260, which is what I am.”

Besides, he added, his 2015 role in new defensive coordinator Van Malone’s system “was kind of a hybrid linebacker/defensive end. I rushed the passer, but I also did a lot of pass coverage.”

Andy McCleneghen worked his way up at SMU from little-known walk-on to versatile starter (photo by SMU athletics).

The move — to either position — does not reflect most of what he did at SMU, but it also does not represent a plunge into new territory for McCleneghen, a versatile athlete who played numerous sports and multiple positions on the football field at The Highlands School in Irving, Texas. If he ends up getting a chance on offense, he said it might give him the best shot of landing a professional job.

“I was all-state in TAPPS (Texas Association of Private and Parochial Schools),” he said. “I was first-team all-state at tight end — that was my main position. So that was my intent out of high school, to play that position. That was my main position, and I think my best position. But then SMU was my only offer, and we didn’t have a tight end in Coach (June) Jones’ offense, so Coach Jones said, ‘do you want to play defensive end?’ and I said, ‘hell yeah.’

“But tight end just comes super-naturally to me. I’ve been out there working out, three times a week with Garrett and Garrett — Garrett Gilbert and Garrett Krstich — just working on running routes and catching passes, and it’s just an extremely natural position for me.”

If McCleneghen performs well enough on Pro Day to earn a chance in the NFL, he would not be the first Mustang to make the transition from college defensive end to professional tight end. Taylor Thompson was a standout defensive end on the Hilltop from 2008-11 but managed to get selected in the fifth round of the 2012 draft by the Tennessee Titans, for whom he played for three years.

“Yeah, that kind of gave me the idea in the first place,” McCleneghen said. “He’s on the bigger end of the tight end spectrum, so I think they used him more as a blocking type — and I can do that, too. I did every special team, and I played some tight end last year. I ran plays as a tight end, I blocked as a tight end, ran a couple routes.

“I’m extremely confident that I have the ability to do it. If I just get a shot and get on a team somewhere, I’ll be able to prove myself. It’s just convincing someone that I can do it. It’s not a normal path, switching positions, switching sides of the ball. It helps that SMU has had someone do that in the past five years, so it has been done.”

McCleneghen is not as big as he once was, having dropped more than 20 pounds since he lined up at nose tackle for the Mustangs, when he carried as much as 280 pounds on his 6-foot-5-inch frame, but he still compares well with current NFL tight ends. The former high school basketball player and soccer goalkeeper runs well — he ran a hand-held 4.79 in the 40-yard dash last week — and has ample strength: the 28 repetitions he did last week on the NFL-standard 225-pound bench press would have been the second-highest total among all tight ends at this year’s NFL combine. McCleneghen is well aware of how tight ends tested at the combine, and said that if he performs at his optimal levels, he can put up numbers that compare favorably with most players at the position.

“(The) No. 1 (tight end) on the bench (did) 29 reps, but that was by a guy that didn’t even show up on the 40, or the other tests,” McCleneghen said. “But my goal there is to be anywhere in the 25-30 range. That would be huge … and then in the 4.7s for the 40, above 30 inches in the vertical, and then around 9.5-10 feet in the broad jump. Then in the shuttle, just be below 4.5.

“Those (numbers) are attainable, but like I said, I’ve been just trying to shoot for all the numbers that were the best in the combine. I might not be the best in any drill, but I’m going to be in the top five or 10 (compared to the tight ends at the combine) in every drill, if everything goes the way I have been doing it the last few weeks.”

At that point, getting a scout’s attention goes past size and strength and speed and convincing scouts that he still has the ability he showed in high school to do the things asked of tight ends.

“Working out with Garrett Gilbert has been huge, because he’s an NFL quarterback,” McCleneghen said of his former teammate, now a member of the Oakland Raiders. “He has been helping me with the type of routes that they run, what they tell their receivers and tight ends, and working with him has given me a lot of confidence. He has been telling me ‘you look at least as good as some of the guys we have,’ so that’s a big confidence boost.”

McCleneghen said he understands that he faces long odds in his effort to make the leap from college defensive lineman to NFL tight end or linebacker. But this is not the first time he has sought a chance to continue his playing career when some assumed it was over.

“It’s actually extremely similar to my recruitment process, because coming out of high school, it was the same type of thing, where nobody really had heard of me, and nobody was giving me a shot,” he said. “But then I got one coach to give me a chance, to let me walk on, and I tried to prove myself every day and work hard every day, and I worked myself from being a walk-on to being a starter.

“So I have done it before. I’m extremely confident in myself. It’s just … I just need to find one team to give me a shot, and then show up and work my ass off every day.”

McCleneghen hopes the versatility that allowed him play multiple football positions and multiple sports in high school will help catch the attention of NFL scouts (photo by SMU athletics).

Everything about McCleneghen’s athletic career has included an emphasis on his versatility. While starring on offense and defense in high school, his career as a part-time soccer goalie revealed that he could kick, and he became his team’s punter. At SMU, his size and athleticism earned him time all over the defensive line, as a stand-up hybrid end/linebacker last season and even some snaps at tight end, as well as extensive duty on special teams. That ability to adapt to any role, he said, should help his chances.

“I think I prefer tight end,” he said. “I honestly think it’s my most natural position, I think it’s what I’m best at, and I really enjoy it a lot. But it’s the NFL — I’ll play kicker if that’s what they want me to do.”

McCleneghen already graduated with a degree in finance, and will earn his Master’s degree in finance this spring. Last week, he was named a 2016 National Football Foundation Gridiron Club of Dallas Collegiate Scholar-Athlete. But before he enters the financial world, he said he’s looking forward to wearing shorts and cleats to his first job interview instead of a suit.

“It comes down to one day for three hours, and you want to make sure you’re at your best for that three hours … which is similar to how football is,” he said. “It’s similar to playing a game — you practice all year for 12 three-hour periods, and that’s probably why it’s such an important day for the scouts, as well. They want to see how you perform under that type of pressure.

McCleneghen knows that not every team will take a chance on him, and there’s a chance that none will. But if given the chance, he said he is confident he can learn whatever system a professional team employs.

“Either way, I’m going to be learning, and I’m confident in my ability to learn and pick things up quickly, so I think wherever I go, I’ll be able to pick it up really quickly,” McCleneghen said. “But every offense uses a tight end, regardless of whether it’s a ground-and-pound (offense) or it’s an Air Raid attack — you need a bigger body on the outside is a mismatch, or bringing him inside to pound in the run game, you need big guys to play fullback or tight end or wing. I think that’s why it has become a position that every team has three or four of. You look at the Patriots — they have (Rob) Gronkowski and now (Martellus) Bennett — Pro Bowl-caliber players at the same position. I think that’s just the way the NFL is moving these days — just versatile players you can move all over the field, and it just creates problems, it creates mismatches.

“I ran a 4.79 last week, hand-held. The thing about the 40 is that it’s all about the start. I’m working on my start, but it’s still not the best start in the world. But once I get going, I’m going pretty fast. So I’m going to keep working on my start and hopefully shave a little bit more off, and if I just get in the 4.7s, I’ll be super-happy with that. I don’t need everyone to like me. I just need one team to decide I deserve a shot.”