When Richie Wessman was hired to lead Napa High School’s moribund football program five years ago, the former NFL assistant coach didn’t dream he was inheriting a team with a future NFL player.

The Grizzlies were coming off an 0-10 season and the intel Wessman had gathered before their first spring practice suggested Napa had very much earned its winless record.

“I had heard from all the people in the town how horrible things were,” Wessman said. “I had no idea what was there.”

Well, Wessman did have an idea. At least he thought he did. Until he was introduced to Brock Bowers.

After being wowed by the 6-foot-1 tight end’s effortless pass-catching and blue-chip speed and agility in T-shirts-and-shorts work, Wessman gained a fuller appreciation for Bowers’ ability in summer practices in the run-up to his junior season.

“I wanted to see what he could do with the ball in his hands,” said Wessman, who spent five seasons on the Tennessee Titans’ staff and also has coached at USC, Clemson and Mississippi. “We threw him a bubble screen and he stiff-armed one guy, he spun around another guy, he juked another guy and sprinted and beat everyone to the end zone. I knew right then, ‘Yeah, he’s everything I thought he could be.’ He was definitely going to be an NFL player.”

Bowers officially will become an NFL player Thursday night when he’s selected in the first round of the 2024 draft, possibly with a top-10 pick. His journey from Napa to the pros included three seasons at Georgia, where he became the only two-time winner of the Mackey Award, given to the nation’s top tight end, in the award’s 24-season history.

Bowers (6-foot-3, 243 pounds) also became the third three-time first-team All-American in school history, joining running back Herschel Walker and defensive lineman/linebacker David Pollack, while amassing massive numbers. According to Pro Football Focus, among all tight ends from Power 5 programs since 2014, Bowers leads the list in receiving yards (2,541), receiving touchdowns (26), receiving yards after contact (689) and missed tackles forced on receptions (44) despite foregoing his senior season.

NFL Network draft analyst Daniel Jeremiah has said a friend of his on Georgia’s coaching staff provided eye-popping perspective on Bowers’ physical gifts: The coach maintained Bowers would have been the Bulldogs’ best running back if they’d placed him in the backfield.

There understandably has been plenty of pre-daft buzz on Bowers, whose intangibles include an insatiable work ethic, white-hot competitiveness and smarts. Bowers had a 4.33 GPA at Napa and was an Academic All-American at Georgia as a finance major.

Former Tampa Bay general manager Mark Dominik believes he should be generating even more hype. Dominik said on a Sirius XM Radio conference call that Bowers merits becoming the fifth tight end drafted inside the top 10 since 2000. Dominik advocated for the Titans to select him at No. 7 if Bowers is still on the board.

“I’m a huge fan of Brock Bowers, and I think he’s very low in a lot of peoples’ mock drafts,” Dominik said. “I think he is going to go easily in the top 10.”

Nathan Kenion, who began coaching Bowers on an elite Bay Area 7-on-7 team, KT Prep, when he was an eighth grader, recalls when Bowers wasn’t in such demand.

In 2019, after Bowers’ sophomore season, he didn’t receive an invitation to an exclusive Nike Sparq camp in the Bay Area. The camps often are described as the high school equivalent of the NFL combine, and are typically filled with four- and five-star recruits. Bowers wasn’t seen on that level. He’d had 42 catches for 620 yards and seven touchdowns on Napa’s 0-10 team; only one college, Nevada, offered a scholarship.

Kenion contacted his friend who was the organizer of the Nike camp to lobby for Bowers’ participation.

“I said, ‘You’re going to want this kid in the event,’ ” Kenion recalled. “‘I know he only has (Nevada), but trust me.”

The invite was sent. Bowers ran the 40-yard dash in 4.5 seconds. And posted a 40-inch vertical jump. And his days in the shadows were over.

“That really got people’s attention,” Wessman said. “And then once they started coming around on Friday nights and saw what he was doing, that really pushed everyone over the top.”

Bowers began his junior year by returning the season-opening kickoff 85 yards for a touchdown against Middletown, the start of a year in which Napa went 7-4 as he played tight end, running back, wide receiver, defensive end and linebacker. Bowers had 39 receptions for 1,098 yards (28.2 yards per catch), rushed for 316 yards and scored 17 touchdowns.

Bowers’ senior season was canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic, but Division I coaches had seen enough. He received more than 20 scholarship offers, including from Michigan, Penn State and Notre Dame (which wanted him to play linebacker), before deciding on Georgia. He began his college career by grabbing 13 receiving touchdown passes to help lead the Bulldogs to the first of two consecutive national championships.

That offered evidence to a larger audience that he was NFL material, a conclusion Wessman said he reached years earlier — shortly after taking over a zero-win team with one special player.

“Yeah, that was a great surprise,” Wessman said, “I had absolutely no clue.”