Bears quarterback Justin Fields wants to be great.
“He wants this to be his franchise — he wants this to be his city,” quarterbacks coach Andrew Janocko said. “Just the way he works. Spend five minutes with the kid, and you know that he’s a dude. He’s a dog. He’s an alpha. You spend a little bit of time with him and you know. This guy, he wants to be it.”
Sunday, though, he won’t be the face of the franchise. He’ll be just like everyone else in a half-filled Soldier Field: sitting and watching one-time third-stringer Nathan Peterman play quarterback in the season finale against the Vikings.
The reason: the Bears’ roster and offense has failed so spectacularly this season to render playing Fields — the most popular, thrilling quarterback the Bears have had in two generations, if not longer — counterproductive.
The 3-13 Bears are incentivized to lose Sunday; if they do and the 2-13-1 Texans beat the Colts, the Bears will be awarded to the No. 1 overall pick in this year’s draft. The Bears have never had a 14-loss team — and haven’t picked first overall since 1947.
If they lose and the Colts win, the Bears will draft second. If the Bears win, they’ll draft no lower than fourth.
Fields was ruled out Wednesday with what the Bears called a hip injury. The Bears say team doctors wouldn’t have cleared him even if a playoff game awaited him Sunday, a claim that’s almost impossible to believe, given the difference in stakes.
Janocko said that Fields was “peeved” to be held out.
“Dude wants to play,” he said. “He’s a competitor.”
He won’t, though, because it doesn’t help the Bears.
“He’ll get something out of this performance by watching the other guys,” head coach Matt Eberflus said, unconvincingly.
Part of the Bears’ failure this season was by design, of course. They’re paying $93.2 million in dead cap money — to account for players no longer on the roster — and $30.6 million to players on injured reserve. Sunday’s active roster will cost $78.8 million, or about 37.5 percent of their total payroll. Only two players who play Sunday — guard Cody Whitehair and defensive lineman Justin Jones — have a cap hit of more than $4.5 million this season.
With a questionable roster, the Bears’ production plummeted after Thanksgiving.
In the last five weeks, only three teams have scored fewer points than the Bears’ 62 — less than half their total of 125 points in the five weeks before that. During the last five weeks, only the aforementioned Colts have a larger point differential than the Bears’ -67.
In Sunday’s 41-10 loss to the Lions, the Bears averaged 1.07 yards per pass, the worst mark of any NFL team this season. It was the fifth-worst average of the last five years — behind, among other games, Fields’ own 0.03 in the infamous 2021 loss to the Browns.
It was a mess.
“[Fields] and I talked in the locker room after [the Lions game],” Janocko said. “When we’re sitting in the locker room next year, we know what we want that game to be about next year and where we want to be when that game happens next year, and what we gotta do to get there. And also how we prevent something like that from happening again.
“So when we are in a scenario, that game is different next year. Then we’ll be ready to go for that, and answer the challenge.”
In the meantime, though, Fields has to watch.
The rest of us can turn away.
