The Bears won't trade Justin Fields (nor should they)
It's that time of the year for dumb draft takes, yay!
Over the past few years, I’ve made a concerted effort to disregard the most asinine takes that the sports entertainment complex has to offer. I’ve succeeded more times than I’ve failed, for a couple different reasons: 1) I’m no longer getting paid to pay attention to every single trending topic and 2) I’ve scaled back how much time I spend on social media.
I still stay in the loop because my sports fandom has not decreased by any amount. But I’m trying to take what we already know — that the social media algorithms and engagement-hungry posters have their designs on making us mad — and laugh off most of the terrible opinions I see.
Trying is the key word there. Sometimes, a hot take emerges that I can’t ignore.
That doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing, either, at least in small doses. It can feel cathartic to fire off a rant every now and then.
That brings me to the subject matter of today’s newsletter: the idea that the Bears should trade Justin Fields and draft Bryce Young at No. 1.
How did this “rumor” start?
I’m not sure where I first saw the suggestion — probably soon after Chicago secured the top pick. I waved it off, because it seemed silly. Even after Bears GM Ryan Poles addressed the question, saying he’d have to “be absolutely blown away” to draft a rookie quarterback, I didn’t think much of it. That’s what any GM would do in that spot, particularly with several QB-needy teams potentially willing to trade up in the draft.
Then former GM Mike Tannebaum (of the Jets and Dolphins, need I say more) weighed in, telling ESPN’s Get Up that he would trade Fields and use the return on the deal to surround Young with more talent.
At this point, I was kind of annoyed, but again, this is just one man’s opinion. He didn’t claim to have any inside information.
In the past week or so, however, that changed a bit and the conversation has picked up again. It started when the perpetually wrong Jason La Canfora tweeted this:
After that, it became the debate du jour across the sports talk landscape. The also-frequently-wrong Todd McShay advocated for Chicago to go after Young:
On Get Up (again), Harry Douglas took the no-trade side against Bart Scott, who thought the Bears should deal Fields so they could gain capital and have a QB on year 1, not year 3, of his rookie contract. On Undisputed, which I will link to out of obligation but highly recommend you don’t click or watch, Skip and Shannon both argued the Bears should move on because Fields admitted it was hard to play in the windy Chicago weather (?). On whatever dumb show dumb Colin Cowherd hosts, he spewed a bunch of his usual garbage.
On The Rich Eisen Show, Mike Florio said the Bears would be “foolish” to dump Fields. Louis Riddick felt similarly and unloaded on the idea on, you guessed it, Get Up:
And finally, RG3 took his analysis to Twitter and summed up everything that needed to be said on the matter:
All in 280 characters too!
Is there any chance this happens?
It’s not without precedent that a team would make such a bold move. In 2019, the Cardinals, somewhat unexpectedly, found themselves with the top pick in the draft. That April, one year after trading up to No. 10 for Josh Rosen, they selected Kyler Murray first overall. Rosen was then traded to the Dolphins.
I completely understood the decision, then and now. Rosen struggled through his first season, as many rookie quarterbacks do, but he also wasn’t really a fit for what incoming coach Kliff Kingsbury wanted to do on offense. Kingsbury, who had recruited Murray and faced off against him in the college ranks, was familiar enough with the dynamic, dual-threat play Murray could bring to Arizona.
After that, Rosen never found his footing in the NFL. Murray has had his ups and downs with the Cardinals, but his highs — Offensive Rookie of the Year, MVP candidate in the first half of 2021 until an injury sidelined him for a bit — have been better than anything Rosen ever showed.
If you compare Fields’ rookie numbers to Rosen’s, they’re fairly similar, though Fields’ advanced stats and, of course, rushing performance were better. Still, the Bears’ situation is not completely analogous to the Cardinals’.
For one, they invested more draft capital (most notably, a first-round pick in 2022) for Fields. Second, Chicago is not undergoing a regime change this offseason, which gives Fields a little stability. This coaching staff knows what it has in the 23-year-old quarterback. More importantly, Fields just finished his second season, one in which he took a big step forward in part because his new OC finally started to design the offense around him in October.
While the Bears didn’t win a game after that rout over the Patriots, Fields’ playmaking was unleashed from that point on:
He finished the season with 1,143 rushing yards, second-most by a QB in a single season, and had a league-high 7.1 yards per carry. He also set a QB single-game NFL record with 178 rushing yards, which came against the Dolphins.
Fields’ passing numbers improved as well, even if there is still plenty of room for growth, something Poles, OC Luke Getsy, and Fields himself have all acknowledged:
Keep in mind, too, that he was working with one of, if not the worst receiving corps in the NFL and a bottom-tier OL in need of several upgrades.
Luckily, the Bears have the resources to make those changes because this was all part of their rebuilding plan. They have more than $100 million in cap space right now and eight draft picks, with more on the way if they trade out of the No. 1 spot. They can follow in the footsteps of the Bills and Eagles, who helped Josh Allen and Jalen Hurts, respectively, make an even bigger leap in their third year by adding the weapons they needed.
In college, Fields was an accurate, big-play passer, more so than Allen and Hurts were at the same level. Like both of those guys, Fields has a strong work ethic and I have no doubt he’ll put in the time to, as promised, fix his mechanics and short passing game.
All of that being said, if the Bears were completely convinced that Young was the next Patrick Mahomes and that they could bring in enough pieces to turn him into an immediate success, then sure, they could trade Fields.
But none of that is very plausible. There are no guarantees that Young could be the Bears’ savior. After all, the Murray-Kingsbury relationship didn’t work out in the long run for Arizona.
Don’t get me wrong; I believe Young can be a great quarterback in the NFL and that the concerns about his height are overblown. At this point, though, he’s less of a proven commodity than Fields, who has (hopefully) gone through the worst of his growing pains as a pro. Going back to a rookie at quarterback might reset the clock on a rookie contract, but it would also put the Bears back in the hands of, y’know, a rookie QB.
So why is everyone talking about this then?
Well, it is the offseason, that lull right between the Super Bowl and free agency. The content machines demand we talk about something, and in today’s NFL, any team that owns the No. 1 pick will have questions about whether or not it’ll draft a quarterback.
Plus, it’s lying season, which means front offices have no compunction about leaking false reports to their favorite members of the media in order to drive up, say, the price of the top pick.
And as we know, certain blowhards with their own TV shows will say anything, whether they believe it or not, for attention and ratings.
It’s all exhausting! And the draft is still two months away!
I think the Bears are committed to Fields, and he’s committed to being the best quarterback he can be for them. They’ll probably find one franchise willing to make a deal for the No. 1 pick, and if not, they’ll just draft an elite defender like Will Anderson or Jalen Carter.
And then we can put all of this nonsense behind us … and move on to whatever absurd storyline will surely take over the NFL airwaves after that.