Where are you on the Justin Fields Belief Meter after the quarterback’s impressive Monday night performance?
Perhaps your needle is all aquiver, the way it is for one national writer who said of Fields’ exploits in the Bears’ beatdown of the Patriots, “We might have seen the first coming-out party — in front of the entire football-watching county, no less — for a future legitimately great Bears quarterback.’’
Or would “I once saw Mitch Trubisky throw six touchdown passes in a game’’ sum up your reservations about Fields?
The good news is that there’s a lot of middle ground. You don’t have to start fitting Fields for his Hall of Fame jacket just yet, and you don’t have to have another seance with all the failed Bears quarterbacks of the past. He had some spectacular moments Monday night and he had some avert-your-eyes moments.
If the Patriots game is any indication, there’s a hole in my theory that teams eventually will figure out how to contain Fields as a ball carrier. Let’s not minimize the opponent. Some of us in the media had framed the game as Fields and coach Matt Eberflus versus Patriots coach Bill Belichick, who is known for identifying what an offense and a player does best, fracking it and daring the other team to beat New England another way. The assumption was that Belichick would figure out how to stop Fields from running the ball – his clear strength – and force him to prove he could make the throws that good quarterbacks make.
Turns out, the Patriots are like everybody else. They couldn’t stop Fields even when they had a pretty good indication he was going to run – which is to say much of the time. Any shrewd observer of the 2022 Bears knows that on third downs, there’s a decent chance Fields will ditch the planned pass play and run. He doesn’t have the greatest offensive line, the greatest receivers or the greatest accuracy as a passer. So he does what he does best. On Monday, he ran five times on third down and picked up a first down each time. That kind of success will only help him as a passer going forward against leery defenses.
His ability to change direction is impressive – not Lamar Jackson good, but really, really good. I don’t think he can escape final judgment, but everything and everybody else, yeah. (If I hear one more football analyst use the term “plant his foot in the ground’’ about a player’s talent for cutting, I will become violently ill.)
Fields ran a career-high 14 times for 82 yards and a touchdown Monday.
His second-quarter touchdown pass to Khalil Herbert was the picture of hope and despair that accompanies these Bears. Out of the shotgun, he pump-faked unblocked Patriots defensive lineman Deatrich Wise off his feet, threw a side-armed screen pass to Herbert and then got panini-ed between Wise and linebacker Matthew Judon. The result was a 25-yard TD play and a quarterback who experienced what the combined force of 530 angry pounds feels like.
It’s not that Fields, or anyone else, thought he was going to escape punishment on the play. By definition, a screen allows rushers into the backfield, freeing up blockers for other duties. But in all that beauty was the reminder of the beating this kid has and will take. Can he last? If you don’t have serious doubts, you must have dead nerve endings.
As for Fields the passer, he was up and down Monday. That has been his habit so far in his career – very early in his career. Some of his passes could have inspired sonnets, they were that perfectly thrown. Other passes were so off course, you wondered if they’d been intercepted by anti-ballistic missiles. Speaking of interceptions, he had one of those against the Patriots, which turned a 13-of-21, 179-yard, one-touchdown effort into an 85.2 passer rating. That’s a little above his career rating of 73.7.
He has a fumbling problem. He had four on Monday, giving him 11 in seven games. He has the most rushing fumbles (five) among NFL quarterbacks.
Put it all together and what do you have? Fields’ performance Monday deserved much of the public enthusiasm it generated. He looked powerfully in control, and that’s not something many clear-thinking people have been able to say about him often in his first 19 games as a Bear. Some of it can be harnessed, especially his running. The rollouts the Bears employed against New England offered Fields protection from his own offensive line.
The bad stuff? He’s not a precise passer, and that’s not going to get fixed this season. He’s going to cost his team a game if he doesn’t clean up his fumbling.
Running, the thing Fields does really, really well, is something to behold. I’ve yet to see an opponent beat him to the edge.
But that one thing, running, worries the hell out of me. How long can he last? Judging by the confetti and the parade buses, I gather no one’s in the mood for sobriety right now.
