Thursday, September 23, 2021

QBNone: A Chicago tradition

 So apparently the Bears will be starting exciting rookie Justin Fields at quarterback Sunday, and he will be QB1 until Andy Dalton heals or Matt Nagy changes his mind again. That's where we are right now with the quarterback situation at Halas Hall.

Which is to say, situation normal, all (bleeped) up.

The acronym for that, of course, is "snafu", which is military jargon but also the unofficial product slogan for Chicago Bears Quarterback Inc. I have been taking up earthly space for 66 years, and in all that time, the Bears have had a Peyton Manning or Tom Brady or Joe Montana at QB1 exactly never. Instead, we got Jack Concannon and Bobby Douglass and Peter Tom Willis and Vince Carter. 

We got Jim McMahon, who was a Super Bowl Quarterback but also a Bears Quarterback -- which is to say, he hit roughly "meh" on the elite scale. We got Jay Cutler, who was actually pretty good but, being a Bears Quarterback, had the huge downside of being a pouty jackass. We even had 4-foot-8 Doug Flutie for fans of novelty acts.

And so this whole Fields/Dalton, Dalton/Fields debate is down-the-middle par for the course. The Bears don't do QB1, see. They do QBNone.

That said, Fields does represent the Bears' most promising quarterbacking prospect since, I don't know, Sid Luckman, maybe. He's got a phenomenal skill set, and a potentially gaudy upside.  All he needs is some experience, and for the Bears not to screw him up.

I have not a scrap of confidence the latter this will actually happen.

What I see instead is Fields -- whose numbers in limited action so far (8-of-15, 60 yards, one pick) are fairly pedestrian -- having the usual rookie growing pains against the Browns, one of the AFC's top teams. Then I see Dalton healing, and Nagy going back to him because Fields didn't set the world on fire and Nagy's a stubborn cuss who'll stick to his original plan to bring Fields along slowly, and ... well, here we go again.

I hope I'm wrong. I hope Fields goes out there Sunday and lights up the Browns like a supernova. I hope he forces Nagy to junk his plan and go with the kid from here on out, and that the kid turns into some sort of Patrick Mahomes/Lamar Jackson cyborg.

Of course, that's just an old man dreaming his dreams. I mean, come on. It's the Bears. We all know what's coming.

A niftier Bobby Douglass. That's my guess.

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