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Justin Fields has improved. That’s indisputable.
Every highly drafted rookie quarterback is charged with the same task: Don’t stay there. His trajectory has been upward, and even in a performance like he had in the Bears’ win over the Cardinals on Sunday — completing 56% of his passes for 170 yards and a 71.5 passer rating while running for 97 yards — his overall progress is clear.
Remember his five-turnover game against the Buccaneers as a rookie? Remember when he completed just seven passes against the Packers last season? Remember when he couldn’t break 100 yards passing against the Chiefs three months ago?
Fields is better than that. And he already is better than the last quarterback the Bears drafted in the first round, Mitch Trubisky, as well as fellow 2021 first-round picks Zach Wilson, Trey Lance and Mac Jones.
But the crucial assessment the Bears must make is whether Fields’ improvement is exponential and rapid enough. Even with all the surrounding turmoil Fields has endured, starting with former coach Matt Nagy having no idea how to develop him, he has enough of a body of work for general manager Ryan Poles to evaluate.
There’s a lot at stake for Poles: his job. A general manager can’t inherit a quarterback one year removed from being drafted 11th overall, then get the No. 1 pick two years in a row as Poles is likely to do and fail to emerge from that sequence with a franchise quarterback.
He must have so much conviction in Fields that he’s willing to bypass the chance to pick any college quarterback he wants — again. Poles has to weigh what he believes Fields’ ceiling is against what he imagines for college stars like Caleb Williams, Drake Maye and a few others.
It’s reasonable to predict Fields could, in a best-case outcome, develop into the 12th-to-15th-best quarterback in the NFL someday. It’s also reasonable for Poles to say he needs more than that when the Bears are trying to beat Jalen Hurts, Patrick Mahomes, Dak Prescott and at least a half-dozen others still in their prime who could be in the MVP conversation any given season.
That list grew by one this year with the addition of spectacular Texans rookie C.J. Stroud, whom Poles essentially passed on in favor of Fields by trading out of the opportunity to draft him. The Texans were almost as bad as the Bears last season — in fact, the Bears beat them — and now they’re tied for the seventh spot in the playoffs and Stroud is an MVP candidate. He’s ahead of Fields after only 13 starts.
Fields’ 84.5 passer rating (21st in the NFL through Sunday) is a hair below last season and his 60.9 completion percentage (27th) is a hair better. His 191.5 yards passing per game (24th) is much higher than last season, when he was last among NFL starters at 149.5. He has supplemented that with 585 yards rushing (second among quarterbacks), a part of his game he and the Bears have said they want to scale back and replace with more passing production.
The other top running quarterbacks, Lamar Jackson, Josh Allen and Hurts, all average at least 220 yards passing per game.
Stroud, by the way, publicly told the Bears not to draft him when they still held the No. 1 pick. He gave a spirited defense of Fields, his friend and former teammate at Ohio State.
“No, I don’t want to go there,” Stroud said of the Bears. “That’s his team. I can do my thing. I can go build my legacy. Me and him are brothers for life.”
The Bears traded the top pick to the Panthers, who drafted consensus No. 1 pick Bryce Young. He hasn’t been anything close to Stroud. To ace that test, Poles would’ve had to keep the pick and gotten it right by taking Stroud first overall. It’s a lot to expect, but that’s the job. And he’s almost certainly about to encounter the same situation again after this season.
The draft is wild. It’s murky and unpredictable. The teams that drafted Sam Bradford, JaMarcus Russell and Tim Couch — all No. 1 overall selections in the last 25 years — didn’t think they were getting it wrong at the time. And the teams that found quarterbacks like Tom Brady, Russell Wilson, Kirk Cousins, Brock Purdy and Prescott in middle or late rounds surely didn’t know quite how right they’d gotten it until later.
So if Poles knew he would land someone as good as Stroud, who already has six 300-yard games compared to one for Fields, there’s no doubt they’d make that upgrade. But it’s always possible the Bears will end up with another Trubisky instead.
The Fields decision is complicated because he’s neither bust nor star. It’d be so much clearer if he definitively was one or the other. But he’s in between. He might go somewhere else and keep growing, whereas no one envisioned Trubisky doing that.
But by default, not having the answer is an answer in itself. Teams that don’t know if they have the right quarterback usually don’t, and as the Bears near the end of the Fields’ third season and pivotal intersection of the 2024 offseason, there’s no way they could be certain of him.
