In my last article, I spoke about the Chicago Bears’ need to draft or sign a free agent offensive guard in this year’s NFL offseason to replace Kyle Long. This time around we will look at the tight end position and profile three potential replacements that the Bears could target in the NFL Draft.
If you look at the current list of players in the tight ends’ room at Halas Hall, it’s hard pointing out any player that you could really have the confidence in being a big-time contributor for this Chicago Bear offense. A lot of that can be due to quarterback production, scheme or other factors, but simply put the Bears have struggled to get any quality production out of their tight ends for quite some time now.
If you go back and look at recent history, the only player to really put together a string of quality production at the position was Martellus Bennett during his stint with Chicago. Between the 2013 to 2015 seasons, Bennett was able to catch 208 passes for 2,114 yards and 16 touchdowns and you could count on him to free up some room in the running game.
Is that type of production realistic for a young player coming into the league? Quite possibly. You’ve seen teams like the Baltimore Ravens, who took risks early on in the 2018 NFL Draft with Hayden Hurst and Mark Andrews and saw immediate dividends. You have to ask yourself first, do you have that type of faith in Ryan Pace to find talent like that and draft it? It would be tough to suggest he would consider one of his tight end draftees (Adam Shaheen) is already looking like a bust and his expensive free-agent signee (Trey Burton) can’t stay healthy.
Realistically speaking, finding a player like a George Kittle, Zach Ertz or Travis Kelce is very tough so us Bears fans may have to temper our expectations when it comes to looking at potential draftees. With that being said, over the next three slides, I will profile three tight ends that I would love for the Bears to target in the NFL Draft in April.