{"id":979564,"date":"2026-08-21T21:51:24","date_gmt":"2026-08-21T21:51:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/979564\/"},"modified":"2026-08-21T21:51:24","modified_gmt":"2026-08-21T21:51:24","slug":"bengals-rookie-jack-endries-and-the-tight-end-brotherhood-just-bear-with-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/979564\/","title":{"rendered":"Bengals Rookie Jack Endries And The Tight End Brotherhood: ‘Just Bear With Me’"},"content":{"rendered":"

If it looks like Jack Endries<\/a> has a bit more NFL polish than your average seventh-round pick, much of it is because Erik Swoope made a promise to his father.<\/p>\n

“No matter what happens,” Swoope recalls, “I’m going to teach someone what a lot of mentors and people around me were willing to do. He, alongside a handful of others, were kind of my first test subjects of how I would teach someone what I learned.”<\/p>\n

Endries, the rookie tight end who walked on at Cal, ran into the draft at Texas and sprinted away with the Bengals’ only touchdown in the preseason opener, has passed with flying colors so far. The next exam in Saturday’s second preseason game (7 p.m.-Cincinnati\u2019s FOX 19)<\/a> against the Bears at Paycor Stadium figures to start a little earlier with quarterback Josh Johnson<\/a> taking the field with the backups on both sides of the ball.<\/p>\n

“Let this preseason game be a reminder,” Swoope told Endries after the opener because Swoope has been talking to him after openers since high school. “You’re doing the right things. You need to stay hungry because there’s a lot of opportunity out there. But you have to go grab it. It’s not going to come your way.”<\/p>\n

If anyone knows about hunger and numbers games and roster jousts and packed tight end rooms waiting on excruciating Labor Days, it is Swoope. Swoope and his 40 or so NFL transactions as a remarkable and inspiring self-made tight end out of the University of Miami who signed with the Colts as an undrafted free agent despite never playing a down of football.<\/p>\n

A 6-4, 250-pound ACC basketball player, Swoope survived with brains, hands, a tight end’s unique want-to ,and help from the brotherhood to play 24 games and 328 snaps across five seasons in Indianapolis. In 2020, when he was trying to get back into the league with the Raiders and 49ers and didn’t, he ended up in the same gym where the 16-year-old Endries and other Bay Area high school players were trying to stay sharp through COVID to keep their college hopes alive.<\/p>\n

A high school club team was formed, and Swoope saw enough to pull him aside after the second practice to tell him, “Look, this is what I do for a living. I never played football a day in my life until I joined the Indianapolis Colts. I’m only going to teach you what I know, and if you’re a willing listener, things will go well. But just bear with me.”<\/p>\n

As it turned out, Endries’ hometown University of California Golden Bears.<\/p>\n

“When COVID hit, there were a lot of six-year seniors and not as many scholarships to get,” Endries says. “Cal took no one at tight end that year. No freshmen at all. I decided I can go there as a walk-on that first semester and earn a scholarship. I never thought I’d \u00a0start that early, but it turned out I did.”<\/p>\n

There were Mountain West offers. Ivy League offers. Harvard. Yale. He committed to Harvard even though some random kid quarterback was texting him out of the Eli blue to go to Yale because that’s where he was headed. “Go to Yale, bro. Go to Yale.”<\/p>\n

Endries ignored it because he was going to Harvard. When he ended up going to Cal and logged in the phone number of his new roommate, he discovered that the Yale texter was the one and the same.<\/p>\n

“Fernando Mendoza,” says Endries of the future Heisman Trophy winner. “He didn’t go to Yale and I didn’t go to Harvard. Then we end up at Cal together. How random is that?”<\/p>\n

Now, if Harvard had a quarterback like Mendoza when Endries and his father took in a game, it might have been a different story. As he watched in horror, this particular quarterback for the Crimson threw a post 20 yards short of the receiver. He turned to his dad and said he couldn’t play there.<\/p>\n

“I did a photo shoot the next day, but my heart wasn’t in it,” Endries says. “I had one foot out the door.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If it looks like Jack Endries has a bit more NFL polish than your average seventh-round pick, much…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":979565,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2053],"tags":[123190,228,443,128329,227,256,2296,7,1843,30952,81,898,6],"class_list":["post-979564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cincinnati-bengals","tag-2026-training-camp","tag-bengals","tag-centerpiece","tag-chicago-bears-at-cincinnati-bengals-2026-pre-2","tag-cincinnati","tag-cincinnati-bengals","tag-cincinnatibengals","tag-football","tag-hobson","tag-jack-endries","tag-latest-news","tag-latest-stories","tag-nfl"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/117135716128281170","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/979564","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=979564"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/979564\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/979565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=979564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=979564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=979564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}