On her latest Making Monsters podcast, Taylor Doll is joined by Jon Helmkamp, who covers both the NFL Draft and the Buffalo Bills, but is also a big Oregon Ducks fan.<\/p>\n
Before getting into the top Ducks who are available in the draft, they start out discussing the newest Bears safety, Cam Lewis, his role in Buffalo, and how he\u2019ll fit on Chicago\u2019s defense.<\/p>\n
There are several Oregon prospects, including safety Dillon Thieneman, guard Emmanuel Pregnon, and linebacker Bryce Boettcher, but Thieneman has been a very popular player mocked to the Bears.<\/p>\n
Thieneman (6\u2019, 201) started his career at Purdue (2023 & 2024) and finished up in 2025 at Oregon. He was a Third Team All-American and the Big Ten Freshman of the Year in 2023, and a First Team All-American in 2025.<\/p>\n
\u201cOregon\u2019s defense likes to play more of a split safety type defense,\u201d Helmkamp said. \u201cThey\u2019re not like a single high type of role, but at Purdue, he played single high. So, he\u2019s shown the ability to play a variety of different alignments from the safety position, which is something that I think NFL teams are going to love.\u201d<\/p>\n
If the Bears are looking for a safety to pair with Coby Bryant, the versatile Thieneman makes a lot of sense.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe has elite closing speed,\u201d Helmkamp continued. \u201cHe could play down close to the line of scrimmage. He can muck it up in the run game. What you see time and time again when you put on the tape of the Oregon defense is Dillon Thieneman is the one that is identifying what\u2019s going on on the offense and getting other people lined up. Like he knows what\u2019s happening. His film study is great. He looks for the trends. He sees what\u2019s going on.\u201d<\/p>\n
Recent mocks have him coming off the board before the Bears come up in the first round, but if he falls, would you like Thieneman if he were available at 25?<\/p>\n
Give Taylor\u2019s full show a listen in either of the embeds below!<\/p>\n
Our 2nd City Gridiron Podcast Channel is available on Apple<\/a>, Spotify<\/a>, iHeart<\/a>, Audacy<\/a>, and other popular podcast platforms, so be sure to hit subscribe wherever you get your audio. Our YouTube home is also called 2nd City Gridiron<\/a>, so subscribe there for our pods and other video content.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s Taylor\u2019s full schedule for her NFL Draft series. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On her latest Making Monsters podcast, Taylor Doll is joined by Jon Helmkamp, who covers both the NFL…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":862110,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[75257,743,741,7768,7,6],"class_list":{"0":"post-862109","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nfl","8":"tag-chicago-bears-analysis","9":"tag-chicago-bears-draft","10":"tag-chicago-bears-news","11":"tag-chicago-bears-podcasts-videos","12":"tag-football","13":"tag-nfl"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/116373267029556755","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/862109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=862109"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/862109\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/862110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=862109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=862109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=862109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}