Tanney joins the Bears from STATS where he was manager of football products and sports analytics and, in the newly-created position, he will be responsible for developing techniques to identify, extract and analyse data to support decisions made by the personnel department and coaches.

“We needed somebody with an expertise in filtering through subsets of data to make sense of them in terms of which pieces are important and which pieces can be put together to give a clearer picture of projecting performance, whether it’s on the field in situational football or in scouting projecting players moving forward,” said general manager Phil Emery.