LAKE FOREST, Ill. — Chicago Bears general manager Ryan Poles passed up a chance to pick an offensive lineman or a pass rusher at No. 25 in Thursday night’s NFL Draft, instead choosing to add speedy Oregon safety Dillon Thieneman to pair with free-agent addition Coby Bryant in a new-look safety unit that features speed and versatility. Both are necessary skills to have in the back of the defense when you still don’t have enough up front.
The pass rush was a noticeable weakness for Dennis Allen’s defense last season, and Poles didn’t do much to address it in free agency or through the trade market. Some top candidates were gone by the time the Bears picked. Can Poles find someone in the next two days of the draft, or will he have to hope for better production from incumbent players?
“Obviously, the D-line helps the back end more often than not,” Poles said. “But in this situation, where we have good corners, good safeties, we can be in a position where maybe we can have the quarterback hold the ball a little longer.”
That plan worked last season, as safety Kevin Byard III and cornerback Nahshon Wright combined for 12 interceptions. But they’re gone now, and the Bears need to figure out how they’re going to get the ball back to Caleb Williams and the offense. Adding Bryant in free agency was a good move. Thieneman makes a lot of sense too, though many mock drafters had Chicago taking Toledo safety Emmanuel McNeil-Warren, who is still on the board for the second round. The Bears had Thieneman ranked higher, and Poles said in their mock-draft simulations, it was about 50-50 that he would fall to them.
“We talk about the board talking to you,” Poles said. “He was standing out. He was elevated on the board. We kind of work lateral and see who else is up there, and he was No. 1 on our priority list. We take the board obviously before all this kicks off, and we sequence it, and he was the top sequence guy on our board.”
Poles can talk up a storm about the team’s process and the highly analytical ways it evaluates, grades and organizes draft picks, but all he had to say was that Ben Johnson liked Thieneman, and that’s good enough for me.
“He was fired up,” Poles said. “He would come in and watch tape with our group. This is one of the guys that we had on when he was in. I mean, we both … I can now feel Ben. He doesn’t say anything. I can feel his body language start to get excited by somebody. You can feel it. It’s that style of play he has that’s contagious. It’s the type of player that we want on our football team.”
Thieneman’s range is a selling point. He and Bryant can play both safety positions, and they’ll give Allen a lot to work with when he’s designing game plans every week.
“He has versatility to play both free and strong,” Bears college scouting director Breck Ackley said. “But the thing that stands out, if you go back to his Purdue tape in ’23, when he had six picks, I mean, he’s really got some center-field range stuff. You know, Oregon used him a little bit … kind of in a rover role at times, in a different role.”
Every draft is important, and if you comb through the Bears’ checkered recent history in that regard, you can see why this team has only had five winning seasons since making the Super Bowl 20 years ago. That was also the last time they had consecutive winning seasons.
With salary cap issues, nailing the draft is critical for this team to match or improve last year’s dream season when the Bears won 11 games and beat Green Bay in the playoffs. They’ve lost playmakers on defense — Byard, Wright, Jaquan Brisker and Tremaine Edmunds — along with receiver DJ Moore.
Thieneman, the second-ranked safety after Caleb Downs on Dane Brugler’s big board, had six interceptions as a freshman at Purdue, none as a sophomore and two in his lone season at Oregon. One stood out, his game-ending pick in Oregon’s 30-24 overtime win at Penn State in September.
Thieneman’s the man 😎
Dillon Thieneman’s walk-off INT to lift @oregonfootball to a 2-OT win at Penn State is our Week 5 𝙋𝙡𝙖𝙮 𝙤𝙛 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙒𝙚𝙚𝙠.
📍 @OldTrapper pic.twitter.com/KZh9lC6b0N
— Big Ten Network (@BigTenNetwork) September 29, 2025
“To seal the game like that was amazing,” Thieneman said. “We’d been talking about that same play from a defensive aspect, the play call and then that offensive formation. We’ve repped both those together in practice. For it to show up in the game just kind of how the coaches predicted was amazing.”
For Poles, it was more evidence that Thieneman was the kind of prime-time player that would help the Bears in those do-or-die moments that decide a season.
“We want players that can rise to the level,” Poles said. “We plan on playing in a lot of big games moving forward. Shoot, I don’t know what the schedule’s gonna be, but I’m sure there’s gonna be a lot of prime-time games. … So we’re gonna need guys that thrive in those moments, so when you show those things, we feel even better about you.”
Athleticism helps, too, and Thieneman, a Westfield, Ind., native, has plenty of that. He ran a 4.35 40 at the NFL combine and, more importantly, he showed he can play fast in his three seasons in college.
“I feel like speed is very interesting because there’s normal speed and then there’s game speed,” Thieneman said. “So the more you can process and recognize, the faster you can play in-game closer to your speed.”
And when he closes in on a player with that 4.3 fleetness, he has some old-school pop to his game that Bears fans, who consider themselves smash-mouth aficionados, will certainly enjoy.
“He’s a violent football player,” Poles said. “He strikes. There’s a knock-back element to his tackling and again … there’s speed and there’s violent speed in terms of just the explosion off the spot, and that’s what he brings. It’s pretty easy tape to watch.”
For the Bears, this draft isn’t about finding building-block players for a future contender somewhere down the road. With Williams at quarterback and Johnson running the show, the time is now to keep a good thing going and make it even better.
After a rocky start to his GM career, Poles is on better footing now with his coaching staff and his roster, and he likes to think he knows what types of players will make the Bears good, better and eventually best.
“They have to play our style,” he said. “They’ve gotta have the right makeup. In terms of our scheme fits, all of that had to be there. If it wasn’t there, you’re off the board.”
As it turned out, Thieneman was atop the board, and he was there for the taking.