Whichever side you fall on — Justin Fields is good enough or Justin Fields isn’t good enough — you have to admit that a trade would give us an answer we haven’t been able to get in Chicago.
If the Bears deal Fields to Pittsburgh, Atlanta or some other quarterback-needy outpost, we’re going to find out what he is.
If he plays well, the Bears will look like the QB dimwits they’ve been for decades.
If he plays poorly, the Bears weren’t the reason for Fields’ lack of meaningful progress as a passer.
Either the Bears didn’t know what they were doing with Fields or Fields simply isn’t that good.
I long for a speedy resolution, for peace, for somebody to turn down the blasted music. General manager Ryan Poles more than suggested Tuesday that a decision on Fields will come soon, which seemed to suggest he’ll trade Fields soon. It can’t come soon enough.
Getting a definitive answer on Fields’ capabilities will be a huge relief after three years spent hotly debating his pros and cons. Imagine a schoolyard argument of “is not” vs. “is too.’’ Imagine it going on for three years. The eternal Fields argument has let us know what it feels like for a head to hit a wall every 15 minutes for months on end. Few of us recall asking to know what that feels like.
I haven’t been subtle in my insistence that Fields lacks what it takes to lead a team to a Super Bowl title, but I hope he does well wherever he goes. It’s time for a new chapter in Chicago, and it’s time for a new chapter in his life. I might be wrong about him, but I don’t think so. If someone else can figure out what to do with an excellent runner with accuracy issues as a passer, more power to that team and more power to Fields. It would be a guilty verdict on former Bears offensive coordinator Luke Getsy, though the quarterback’s fans locked him up a long time ago.
Fields isn’t as good as his hordes of backers think he is, but after three years of this, it’s time for everyone to move on. We can watch him from afar and get a better understanding of exactly what he is and what he isn’t.
I’m tired of every Fields’ mistake turning into a treatise on which person not named Justin Fields was responsible for it. I’m exhausted by a bad game by Fields devolving into a discussion on everything other than quarterbacking.
We in Chicago are so dug in on our viewpoints that we’ll never be able to see the truth if he stays with the Bears.
It’s time he goes. It’s time we find out.
If you take Poles at his word, it sure sounds like he’s going to trade Fields and use the No. 1 overall pick on USC quarterback Caleb Williams. It is the NFL’s lying season, but Poles said two things at the combine Tuesday that suggest he’s leaning in that direction.
First, he said he wants “to do right by” Fields, meaning that the quarterback shouldn’t be subjected to a long wait while the Bears decide what to do. The draft is still two months away. That sounds like a GM ready to make a trade, and that sounds like a player on his way out of town.
Two, Poles favorably compared Williams to Chiefs megastar Patrick Mahomes as a prospect. You don’t do that unless you’re enamored with the kid. And you especially don’t do that in Chicago, which hasn’t forgotten that the Bears passed on Mahomes in the 2017 draft in favor of Mitch Trubisky.
It’s possible that Poles is head-faking just to see how high other teams are willing to go to secure the rights to Williams, a natural-born playmaker whom many consider the perfect combination of skilled runner and passer. It’s also possible he wants other teams to feel an urgency in trade talks for Fields, hoping to raise the compensation.
More likely, however, is the possibility that Poles has seen what those of us on the time-to-move-on train have been saying for well more than a year: that Fields, although a wonderfully talented athlete, doesn’t have the passing skills necessary to lead the Bears to their first Super Bowl title since the 1985 season.
The best way, the only way, for this argument to end is for Fields to wind up somewhere else besides Chicago.
That will finally give us a conclusive answer. I think.
