Remember the big dramatic hug on the practice field between Bears quarterback Justin Fields and offensive coordinator Luke Getsy a few months ago?
They’re with each other all day, every day, of course, so they could hug anytime they want, but Fields really wanted to do that in front of the cameras after going public with his frustration about being overcoached. There was too much being fed into his head, he said, and it was preventing him from playing naturally.
That was a rough week for the Bears. But while hurt feelings are fixable, the current disconnect between Getsy and Fields might not be.
There has been a chicken-and-egg question about Fields and Getsy ever since the Bears put them together: Is Getsy hampering Fields by drawing up overly careful game plans or is Getsy making the best of a situation in which he has to scheme around Fields’ limitations?
Either answer is a huge problem.
It’s a Matt Eberflus problem, too, because this is all an extension of him. The buck doesn’t stop at Getsy. It stops at the coach who hired him and signs off on the game plan every week. A defensive-minded coach can get fired for the offense floundering. Eberflus acknowledged that reality the day the Bears introduced him.
As the Bears barely got by the middling Vikings on Monday, winning 12-10 on four field goals, their passing game was unwatchable. Of Fields’ 37 passes, 16 were at or behind the line of scrimmage and only five flew at least 10 yards downfield. Fields completed 73% of his passes, the fourth-highest mark of his career, but was mostly unproductive at 5.9 yards per pass.
This was not a one-off against some overwhelming defense. The offense looked a lot like that in the first three games of the season, when 25 of Fields’ 88 passes traveled more than 10 yards, and he averaged six yards per pass and had a 67.7 passer rating.
There’s no way Fields thinks this is all he can do, but it also seems clear that Getsy believes otherwise after watching him practice and play the last two years.
Pull up Fields’ highlight reel from Ohio State, where he was dominant, and it’s full of deep darts. He looks unrecognizable from the player he is now.
Those were different circumstances, of course. At Ohio State, Fields dropped back and stood behind an impenetrable offensive line and launched passes to uncontainable wide receivers. It’s never going to be like that in the NFL. Even the best teams aren’t as far ahead of their opponents as Ohio State was over Rutgers and Nebraska.
It’s the biggest challenge for every quarterback who comes from college stardom. Matt Nagy was not the right coach to help Fields make that transition, and Getsy hasn’t guided him through it, either.
Some of that is on Fields, too, and there are troubling indicators that he might not necessarily be able to carry out a bolder, more aggressive passing attack. He has been sacked 120 times in 35 games, and while the Bears have had offensive-line issues, some of that is because of indecision. He often struggles to reach even 200 passing yards. Between fumbles and interceptions, he has been a turnover liability since they drafted him.
The result? In almost two seasons of the Getsy-Fields pairing, the Bears rank 20th in points (19.6 per game), 23rd in passer rating (82.2) and last in passing yards (153.3 per game). They’ve won seven of 29 games.
If the Bears knew whom to blame, they’d know whom to replace. But the answer probably is a little of each of them.
If they fire Getsy, is there an offensive coordinator available to hire who could vault Fields to the top of the league? If they trade Fields, is anyone confident in Getsy grooming the incoming draft pick?
Neither of those paths seems sound. The Bears’ best chance will be to reset with new faces in both spots.
When they do that, they need to do it in the right order for once. When they hired Nagy, they saddled him with a quarterback (Mitch Trubisky) he didn’t pick. They did the same with Eberflus and Getsy, who inherited Fields one year after the Bears traded up to draft him No. 11 overall.
Partial clean-outs lead to those awkward fits, and they could be headed for another one soon if they change quarterbacks but keep the same staff in place.
Redirecting the offense could mean hiring a new coordinator or maybe the Bears will hire an offensive-minded coach to replace Eberflus. One of the biggest criticisms of choosing him in the first place was that they needed an offensive-minded coach to develop Fields.
The best course from here is to start over. Bring in someone new to run the offense and give that person a loud voice in the draft. There’s no predicting how that will turn out, but at least it will be a functional approach for once.
