Nobody is happier than the sports media that Justin Fields is still a Bear. We’re in the dead portion of the calendar, that gray area after the end of the NFL season but before the beginning of the baseball season. The NBA and the NHL trudge toward the distant playoffs. The NCAA Tournament can’t get here soon enough.
Iowa’s Caitlin Clark has set college basketball on fire with her shooting ability, but she’s not an argument. She’s a declarative sentence. Fields is a living, breathing debate, which is why ESPN, against all odds, has found room for him in its fixed menu of Cowboys coverage and LeBron James preoccupation.
For the last month, the gist of the local and national conversation about Fields has been how valuable he could be to other teams, specifically the Steelers and Falcons. This has been presented by many analysts as a given, not a theory. His ability to run and the purported poor coaching he received in Chicago point to a guy who will be a star somewhere else, they say.
It’s possible that the Bears will trade Fields soon, but the one thing that has stood out so far is that there doesn’t yet seem to be the leaguewide clamoring for the quarterback that the Fields enthusiasts had predicted. This might make a clear thinker wonder whether Fields is not quite as good – gasp! – as his backers think he is. Forgive me my dark thoughts.
It’s also possible that teams are waiting for the first domino to fall. When the Broncos announced last week that they would release Russell Wilson, it added another wrinkle and created more debate, until he reportedly planned to sign a one-year deal with the Steelers. I’d bet that Fields’ truest fans scoff at the idea of Wilson being more valuable than their guy, but inside the NFL, there doesn’t appear to be a lot of scoffing going on. Just a lot of due diligence. Teams can start making offers to free agents Monday.
Maybe this isn’t a story about a star-crossed quarterback named Justin Fields. Maybe this is a story about a fan base so damaged by decades of quarterback failure that it can’t see straight.
We’ve reached that point in a tragic love story where a question has to be asked:
How large is the percentage of Bears fans who would be happy if Fields succeeds somewhere else and the Bears struggle with No. 1 overall pick Caleb Williams as their starting quarterback?
That’s a long way of asking how powerful spite is and how important being right is to some people.
Judging by how hard Bears fans have grabbed on to the idea that Fields is great and his talents squandered so far — think of floating sailors clinging to a piece of the mast — I’d say the number of Bears fans wishing good on Fields and bad on their team is not small. That’s just a guess, based on three years of angry emails and social-media posts I don’t recall requesting.
I don’t mean to pile this on Bears fans. I spend part of most mornings watching the various national sports talk shows. Many of the commentators have gone out of their way to say that Fields could be very good with another team. How much of this is conviction and how much is groupthink, I couldn’t say.
There’s probably any number of explanations for why a team has yet to scoop up Fields in a trade. Perhaps Bears general manager Ryan Poles is asking for too much in return. Remember, there was a time when the Fields hype was at full blast and some experts thought the Bears could get a first-round pick for him.
“If you trade Justin Fields to Atlanta, you could get the eighth overall pick,” ESPN draft analyst Mel Kiper Jr. said in January.
One unnamed NFL coach recently agreed with the talk of a first-rounder for Fields.
“Supply and demand,’’ he said.
But Wilson added to the supply, and at least four quarterbacks — and as many as six — are expected to go in the first round of next month’s draft. Free agent Kirk Cousins will be available Monday.
Fan bases have a tendency to overrate their heroes, so it wouldn’t be a surprise if some Bears fans gag at the suggestion that Cousins and Wilson are better than Fields. But, again, teams desperate for a quarterback seem to be doing a lot of comparison shopping right now. No one has rushed to make a trade, or at least no one has had a proposal accepted. It hints at the possibility that teams don’t look at Fields with the ardor some of his biggest fans do.
To those fans, the question stands: How strong is your desire to see Fields succeed with a new team and Williams to struggle as a Bear?
I’ll hang up and listen to your denials.
