Bears Hire Jim Dray as Tight Ends Coach

The Chicago Bears are wrapping up their coaching hires as yet another assistant has been hired. Per Albert Breer of SI NFL, they have hired Jim Dray as their new tight ends coach. He most recently served as an offensive quality control coach for the Arizona Cardinals these past two seasons.

This is his first time coaching a specific position group after starting off as an offensive assistant and quality control coach.

He’s also an experienced player at the position. Before coaching, he was selected by the Arizona Cardinals in the 7th round of the 2010 NFL draft. In all, his NFL career as a player lasted 7 whole seasons, with stops between the Cardinals, Buffalo Bills, and Cleveland Browns. He hung up his cleats and started coaching as an assistant with Stanford in 2018.

Since 2018 he’s already ventured around multiple NFL franchises. It is curious to see someone who learned briefly under Freddie Kitchens and Kliff Kingsbury as an assistant being hired to oversee the Bears’ tight ends position group. As the old saying goes, they’ve got to start somewhere, right? Time will tell how well his experience as a player translates into being a positional coach.

He already has a big fan in Cardinals Tight End Zach Ertz. Now we’ll see if he can untap the potential of Cole Kmet, or other players to be brought into the group in the near future.