Bly named Lions assistant coach
Western Branch alum will guide team’s CBs
DETROIT — Dré Bly is making a return to the NFL, but he won’t be strapping on shoulder pads and a helmet.
On Thursday morning, Bly announced via Twitter that he’d been hired by Detroit Lions head coach Dan Campbell to be the team’s new cornerbacks coach.
The hire comes after Bly recently left his job as cornerbacks coach at North Carolina.
Bly is a Western Branch High alum who also played for North Carolina. He had an 11-year career in the pros, spanning from 1999-2010. Taking the job with Detroit will be a homecoming of sorts for Bly, who spent four of those years with the Lions.
In 2003 and 2004, the first two years of his stint in Detroit, Bly was named to the Pro Bowl.
He totaled 19 of his 43 career interceptions and 202 of his 528 tackles for Detroit. He also led the NFL in fumble return yards during his first year with the Lions in 2003.
Before his time with the Lions, he played with the St. Louis Rams for four seasons. Bly was a member of the Rams team that won Super Bowl XXXIV and the team that fell short in Super Bowl XXXVI, losing 20-17
to New England in Tom Brady’s first Super Bowl triumph.
Bly was a standout for UNC and was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame in 2014.
With the Tar Heels, he was a
consensus first-team All-American twice — making him the only player in UNC and ACC history to do so.
His coaching career started in 2018, when he was hired in
October to be the defensive backs coach for the San Diego Fleet of the Alliance of American Football. A few months later, he joined the staff at UNC, where he stayed until January.