It didn’t take much for Justin Fields’ footing as the Bears’ franchise quarterback to slip a little, and that’s not surprising here.
The Bears’ exasperating history at the position makes it the most volatile job in Chicago sports: The public is overly eager to declare you a hero, and unless you can immediately live up to that, the clock starts ticking on your exit. Mitch Trubisky was overzealously celebrated as the answer in 2018, then got booed off the field halfway through the next season.
Fields, who will sit out the final game Sunday against the Vikings, has put together the second-greatest rushing season by a quarterback in franchise history and improved most of his key passing stats despite the Bears putting minimal talent around him.
Yet the idea of general manager Ryan Poles trading him and rebooting the position with the No. 1 or 2 pick in the draft keeps coming up. There have been entire segments about it on both sports radio stations this week.
It’d be an epic mistake.
Fields differs from past Bears’ hopefuls in that he has a sustainable skill as a runner and has progressed as a passer without any help. He’s the best running quarterback in the NFL, and it’s been a while since any Bears quarterback was the best at anything.
When Giants owner John Mara assessed quarterback Daniel Jones a year ago, coming out of his third season, he said, “We’ve done everything possible to screw this kid up.” The Bears could say the same of Fields after his first two seasons.
First, they put him through the counterproductive ordeal of playing in Matt Nagy’s offense and under his and Ryan Pace’s ill-conceived plan to take an elite college quarterback and glue him to the bench for his rookie season as though he was a project.
Then they cleaned up all of those issues and saddled him with new ones. While coach Matt Eberflus and offensive coordinator Luke Getsy have done far better matching their scheme to Fields’ strengths, every fear about the personnel Poles put around Fields has come true.
Some of it has even been scarier than expected.
It is routine to see Fields face pressure the moment he finishes his drop back, and since defenses can get to him with just a four-man rush, that leaves a spy to help contain his running. All of that might be navigable if he had options downfield, but often nobody’s open. It’s impossible.
Fields can’t ask for perfect circumstances. That’s unrealistic. And virtually any quarterback can thrive when everything around him is in place. That’s not special. But Fields has managed to make discernible strides when everything around him has been wrong.
He bumped his passer rating by 13 points from his rookie season to 85.2 and made modest improvements in completion percentage (58.9 to 60.4), touchdown percentage (2.6 to 5.3) and interception percentage (down from 3.7 to 3.5) — all while being sacked a league-high 55 times.
There’s still tons of room to improve — he averaged a league-low 149.5 yards per game and threw for just 75 last week — but his improved efficiency suggests that he’ll be capable of more production once he gets better protection and better targets.
If the Bears ever wanted to trade him, this would be the time to do it. His stock is high, and if they get the No. 1 pick in the draft, they’d have their choice of Alabama’s Bryce Young and Ohio State’s C.J. Stroud. But they’d be unraveling one of the few boxes they’ve actually checked this season.
Fields hasn’t made a case that he’s headed toward being a top-five quarterback, but there have been sufficient signs that he’ll be good, at minimum. The Bears are best served leaving that problem solved and continuing to work through what looks like an endless to-do list with the rest of the roster.
