Ah Crap, Guys, I'm Excited About Justin Fields

Anyone who knows me or notices the long gaps of inactivity on this blog will probably gather that I gave up on the Bears the minute it was clear that the Jay Cutler Era, the black hole into which I had poured all of my blood, sweat, and tears for years, was going to end in tragedy. For the first time in my life I found other things to do with my Sundays. I followed on twitter on draft night in 2017 as the Bears did the predictable thing and passed on what I felt was the obvious choice at QB and drafted Mitch Trubisky. Like many other of Trubisky's skeptics I briefly thought I may have been wrong about him after his hot start in 2018, but while watching him blunder his way through the opener in 2019 against the Packers I realized he was who he was, a mediocre QB, and once again my interest in the Bears waned with the realization that no matter how else the rest of the roster shaped up they would, as they had for most of my life, be stuck trying to win in a passing league without an elite passer. You can call me a bandwagon fan at this point, I guess, but after 30 years of watching Krenzels and Morenos and Hanies, there's a lot of comfort to be found in just not letting the Bears have any control over your daily emotions, it saves you from caring when they do shit like lose Kyle Fuller because they needed the cash for Andy f'ing Dalton. 

So it was that I entered the night of the NFL Draft not hosting a draft live chat, as we once did around these parts, or taking my family to a sports bar to watch it on TV, as I sometimes did as well, but instead following it only as a bystander, trying to keep a safe distance from the agonized tweets of my Bears fan pals who had yet to find the ability to stop caring. Then twitter lit up, the tweets came fast and furious, the rumors swirling, and the Bears, the mother fucking Bears, were up at #11 with Justin Fields still on the board, and I laughed. Oh no, they won't do that, no no. They couldn't. Not my Bears. Sorry, I mean, not THE Bears. Definitely not my Bears anymore. I don't care. No siiiiHOLY SHIT IT'S JUSTIN FIELDS.

Fuck, they're my Bears again. I'm back. I've got to see how this plays out. Because I have the feeling that this time, for all their thundering idiocy (and no, I don't think Ryan Pace and Matt Nagy have gotten any less stupid), they have a shot, because they have a quarterback. How do I know they have a quarterback? Haven't I thought I knew before? Well, let's break it down:

1) Justin Fields Can Make All the Throws. 

Now this is an old scouting phrase, one usually used to denote arm strength. It typically means "this guy has the requisite arm strength to throw a 20 yard out route to the sideline with the velocity necessary to avoid a corner trying to jump said route." Justin Fields sure has that, but when I say Justin Fields can make all the throws I mean the guy can actually hit them. Mitch Trubisky did not have a cannon for an arm, but nobody questioned coming into the league whether he had the velocity to hit the entire route tree. The problem is his flawed mechanics meant that some throws that should have been in his armory just weren't, which I think anyone who ever watched him try to hit a guy running a crossing route to the left side of the field knows. 

Justin Fields is accurate, insanely so. Accurate to all parts of the field. His adjusted completion % was over 80%. His adjusted completion % on intermediate throws was also above 80%, and even on deep throws (defined as 20+ yards downfield) his adjusted completion % was 59%. His predecessor entered the NFL hitting 68% and 40% of his intermediate and deep throws in college, respectively, both areas where he ended up struggling greatly in the NFL. 

Now any quarterback that aspires to greatness has to do more than be better than Mitch Trubisky, so it's important to note that Fields isn't just better than the Bears last pick at QB, in many ways he was the best QB in his draft class. Fields ranked first or second amongst the 2021 QBs in adjusted completion % and downfield accuracy. He was the best in the group at completion % under pressure, and he was pressured on a higher percentage of his snaps than any of the other first round QBs. Quite simply this is a QB who truly can make every throw, to every part of the field, with velocity and pinpoint accuracy. 

Don't get me wrong though, if you're wondering about raw arm strength my God has this kid got a cannon, the thing old readers of this site might recognize as a coveted Armcock. 

2) No, it Doesn't Matter That He Went to Ohio State

I mean I don't know if he has a gambling problem, but I feel confident you can tell this guy isn't Art Schlichter. He was picked off just nine times in two seasons at Ohio State rather than in two games, so I don't think he's Craig Krenzel. His completion % is about 10 points higher than Terrelle Pryor at his best despite a Yards Per Attempt figure nearly two yards higher, so I don't think his future is at slot receiver. 

But what about Dwayne Haskins? Isn't that a fair question to ask? The guy who was there right before him, shared some of the same supporting cast, played in the same offensive scheme, and yet Paxton Lynch'd his way out of Washington in less than half a contract? Isn't that a fair comp?

No. For one, the physical differences are quite clear. Fields ran a 4.4 forty and racked up over 1,000 rushing yards in college. Haskins forty clocked in over the dreaded five second mark and he came about 900 yards shy of Fields' rushing totals, he even made history by being the rare quarterback to break the unwritten rule that Anonymous NFL Scouts have to compare players solely to other players of the same race by drawing multiple comparisons to famously stonefooted Drew Bledsoe. 

If your concern though is that Fields will share Haskins limitation as a passer if not as a runner, well, don't be. Fields is by far a more polished, accurate passer. He led all college QBs in PFF grade from a clean pocket the last two years. More importantly, even if the playbook was the same, the playcalling was very different at Ohio State for Fields than it was for Haskins because of Fields unparalleled accuracy and deep ball ability. Fields gained over 70% of his yards at Ohio State through the air, obliterating Haskins, who gained just 51% of his yards through the air and relied heavily on YAC from receivers running underneath routes and screens in order to inflate his totals. Fields deep ball accuracy (56% as noted above) was also much higher than Haskins, who clocked in at 43%. Haskins, who was unable to scramble, was a one year starter and not fully acclimated in the playbook and was far more reliant on screens, short throws, RPOs, and other QB friendly shortcuts than Fields, a guy who pretty much led all of college football in dropping straight back and firing rockets all over the yard. Whether or not the guy succeeds in the NFL it won't have shit to do with the helmet he wore in college, he is unlike any other QB the Buckeyes have sent to the draft before. 

3) The Anonymous Scout Industrial Complex Remains Full of Shit

We go through this every spring since time immemorial. Some guy for ESPN calls an "anonymous scout" who may be a long retired dude who once was an area scout for Gil Brandt and the Tom Landry Cowboys and also mowed the practice fields, or might be a guy who writes for Pro Football Weekly and hasn't ever had a real job in a front office ever, or worse it might just be someone who knows absolutely nothing about evaluating quarterbacks, like anyone who has ever worked for the New York Jets in any capacity. That anonymous scout thrashes Promising Young Black Quarterback, issuing a farting miasma of the standard "he can't play from the pocket," "he's too reliant on his legs," "his leadership and work ethic are questionable," and before we know it the elite black passer who has repeatedly demonstrated his value in the biggest games college football has is suddenly behind some white guy from a MAC school who looked real Poised taking down the winless Eastwestern Kentucky Blueballs. Why we give this shit the time of day I don't know, but here we are.

"He was surrounded by superior talent" for fuck's sake in case anyone noticed the QBs going in the first in this draft went to Alabama, Clemson, and Ohio State or they were the biggest fish in a shitty FCS or their toughest game was somehow against Coastal Carolina. All of these guys generally had the more talented team on their side in any given contest, but even if we were to try to take this take seriously, I can't, because Fields actually had the worst supporting cast of this entire lot. Fields got the fewest yards per game out of the foursome of Lawrence/Wilson/Fields/Jones from screens and RPOs. He gained the most yards through the air and had the highest average depth of target. His receivers dropped the highest % of his passes, his offensive line allowed pressures on the highest % of his dropbacks, and per PFF his receivers were the second lowest graded group of the four while his offensive line ranked last by a stretch. Despite all this he managed to put up an all time legendary game against Clemson, an even more talented team, and held his own against Alabama, and finished the year PFF's second highest graded QB overall. 

"He's a one read QB." Alright this one's just yesteryear's notion that black QBs were not smart enough to remain at the position in the NFL dressed up in some easily disproven bullshit. Fields was PFF's highest graded QB on throws after his first read. Here is an excellent thread, with video, showing Fields routinely scanning the field and finding open receivers well after his first read. Finally you know this one's horseshit because, as I noted above, Fields got just 8.5% of his total passing yards and just around 10 yards per game from RPOs and screens (for comparison that figure is 27% for Trevor Lawrence and 22% for Mac Jones, two white QBs who shockingly have never had their intelligence or ability to scan a defense questioned). He led the NCAA getting over 70% of his total passing yardage through the air, before the catch. Now we saw very painfully how Mitch Trubisky's college and most of his NFL passing statistics were gently massaged by a bunch of RPOs and screens and easy throws designed to hide that he WAS, in fact, mostly a one (or no) read quarterback. There's not an offensive coordinator on earth or a receiving corps so talented at getting open that a quarterback in said offense could complete over 70% of his passes, gain over 70% of his yards through the air, and gain virtually nothing from screens and RPOs, if that quarterback was truly incapable of looking beyond his first read. There's just no way his first guy was that open every single time. 

"His processing speed is slow." Now the truth is Fields does struggle a bit with blitz recognition, but even then this problem is somewhat overblown. On a normal play, in a clean pocket, Fields was the highest rated passer in the college game precisely because he is perfectly capable and quite good at going through a progression and finding the right guy. He had the fewest turnover worthy throws in college football the last two seasons precisely because he rarely made bad reads and forced the ball into bad spots. Where he struggled was against rolling coverages behind a blitz in three big games, Indiana, Northwestern and the 2019 playoffs vs. Clemson. These failures were highly covered and got overblown. You know what other young QBs struggled against defenses able to roll their coverage behind a blitz? Pretty much all of them. Zach Wilson's not being scrutinized for his public failures against excellent college defenses in playoff/conference title games because the sonofabitch never played an excellent college defense. This isn't a fatal flaw so much as it an area for growth and development. Very few, if any, college passers have ever entered the league ready to handle every exotic blitz package a guy like Jim Johnson in his heyday could dream up. The good ones figure it out on the way, and I have every confidence Fields will too. 

So strap in folks, the Bears have themselves a quarterback. They've also got an idiot GM and an unjustifiably arrogant, inflexible head coach and a cap situation that's an absolute nightmare, because you knew damn well if the Bears ever did try and get it right at the most important position in sports they'd still refuse to get out of their own way in the process. We'll have to see how this plays out, but god dammit, I know I'll be watching.

Go Bears.