When we talk about QBs - The real problem isn't that the Bears have "ruined" all these good young QBs. The real problem is that we've barely even drafted any good prospects.
In the past 35 years the Bears have drafted 4 QBs in the first round:
Cade McNown
Rex Grossman
Mitch Trubisky
Justin Fields
Justin Fields is the best prospect of this group - mostly because the other 3 were reaches/bad picks.
The truth is most QBs bust - and you have to take more swings at the most important position.
Not being accusatory or anything but did you cut it off right at 35 years to not include Harbaugh as a first rounder in the 87 draft? Maybe that’s just me showing my age haha but the other thing I would say is the draft isn’t the exclusive use of first round picks, we used a first rounder on Rick Meyer in the 90s, we used two first rounders to trade for Cutler, and we used two first rounders on Fields who as you said is the best prospect of that group. So in other words in the last 36 years we have used nine first rounders on the quarterback position, literally 25% of all of our first round picks. And there’s also the simple reality that you do need to have talented guys around quarterbacks for them to fully develop. but in terms of resource allocation, we have put a ton into the quarterback position.
We were so bad last night, Charger fans forgot about how much they hate Brandon Staley.
Honestly probably bought Staley some more games, or even the year if they go on a run from here.
The mental gymnastics made for Bagent are wild to me. I think he played pretty bad last night. Put the ball in danger way too many times, showed lack of arm talent as we all feared, and he did it against the worst passing defense in football.
The Chargers went into that game giving up 300+ yards passing and a rating of 105.6 on average.
I think people may have overreacted a little bit from that 162 yards passing performance. Bagent is a really interesting developmental prospect. And we don’t get many of those here. Maybe in a year or two he’ll take a step up. But anyone who thinks he’s the guy right now is sippin on some good stuff.
I think he played pretty bad last night.
But he didn't. It's not mental gymnastics at all. They were playing from, so you take bigger risks to make up the difference - you put the ball in danger. That's football 101. Given the danger he was asked to put the ball in, he did very well all things considered.
Yeah, he has the arm talent of a rookie.
We can say he played average. But you cant say he played bad. That's just factually incorrect.
Ryan Poles is building this team like he has years to do it. I'm sure he was assured a few seasons to shake out a roster filled with bad contracts and to start over. He couldn't feel that his job was in jeopardy because then smart, long term moves would be replaced with rash, short term moves. I think Poles has made mistakes but has made more good decisions. Also it helps Ryan that people above him are preoccupied with securing a new stadium deal.
It also seems like Flus is toast and he knows it. Good coaches get the most out of the talent they have. It's safe to say that isn't happening for the Bears.
Poles stays, Flus is gone.
I can’t wait to get rid of the coaching staff
Draft MHJ and the Best OL and DL. And hit DL in Free Agency. Simple
Truly hope Fields comes back and balls out on Sunday. Bagent is a good backup and it's great to have that but people thinking he is a superstar have lost it.
Time to bench Cody and give Carter a chance. Hopefully Braxton comes back this week also
On to the next one Tank Commander Flus
The absolute worst thing that happened this year was beating the commanders. I really think if they would've beat the shit out of us then someone would've gotten fired. I'm scared that Fields will come back and win us enough games that the front office thinks we should ride it out with this staff.
"Buh buh buh Fields bad"
We still have the Panthers, cousinsless vikings, Packers, Cardinals. That should absolutely be 4 wins. No question about it. Not to mention games we could accidentally win like the Falcons and saints. We could easily win 5 more games and finish 7-10. And boy oh boy would that be bad fucking news for us.
Sell the team and fire everyone
I think we’ve seen enough from this coaching staff. Time to go.
Should have had two more TDs. The sideline where he was never touched and the drop by Velus in the end zone. Would have been a completely different game.
We have the worst coaching staff,Center and Defensive line in the league
You said the D line would be improved tho
Bagent made a handful of throws that were legit impressive. That off balance touch throw to Moore was 100/100. A real, honest to goodness impressive throw from a Bears QB. He has solid touch and it's encouraging to see him play with swagger and confidence as that's one of the only ways a non-elite athletic talent can stick. Judging him fairly (UDFA rookie, 2nd start) he did more than fine. A lot of his mistakes are the same rookie mistakes virtually every young QB makes, whether drafted 1-1 or not drafted at all.
I'm not taking "he's a career backup" claims after two starts seriously when people call out him throwing into coverage or missing reads, when every single rookie does the same thing. Peyton fucking Manning had like 30 INTs his rookie year because it took him a long ass time to realize the throws he made his entire life were no longer viable in the NFL. Bagent sees a window that isn't there and throws the ball at it because he's a rookie that hasn't learned what a safe or smart NFL pass is yet. Shit, guys like Hurts and TLaw STILL do it too often. It's hard af to adjust to the dramatic increase in defensive talent and scheming at the NFL level.
Criticism of his arm is also overblown and a nonsensical reason to label him a career backup after two starts. How did we get to a point where not being able to sling it like Herbert or Allen or Randall Cunningham meant you can't start? Bagent very clearly has a mediocre, average NFL arm. People harping on his two underthrows on deep balls fail to mention that he overthrew VJJ on a deep route later in the game, likely as compensation for being short on the first two deep throws. How can a guy with an unusable noodle overthrow one of the fastest guys in the league? Hmmm. Maybe he doesn't have a noodle but rather hasn't developed good touch on deep throws because the guys he's throwing to run faster than anyone he's ever thrown to and on top of that he has to sling the ball out in half the time he's used to. You know, rookie shit you see every year from every Qb. Except Will Levis I guess.
If you have above average qualities elsewhere you can make up for a non-elite arm. Guys like Brees and Montana had Bagent arms and did kinda fine, no? They had top tier talent around them and were top tier decision makers and that was that. Bagent isn't going to become Montana or Brees, obviously, but it's not like he can't become a Brad Johnson or something. A guy with a mid arm that is good enough to be an average to above average NFL starter because he limits his mistakes and eventually hones in on the accuracy portion of the game.
We don't know his ceiling. It very well may be career backup. But we don't know. We have two games to look at. Better than the first two games of a lot of guys who have had good careers. I've recently watched back a lot of 2006 recently and can say with confidence Bagent is at least a tier above Sexy Rexy. That motherfucker played so dumb and threw in what looked like slow motion when he wasn't just randomly heaving a ball downfield that would land way out of bounds or 10+ yards away from any receiver. So uhhhh yeah, there's that. Bagent > Grossman. Print it.
With Justin coming back, we're not gonna see any more real on field growth from Bagent this year, and we already know where Justin is headed after this season (out of Chicago). So really the QB talk is just something we're all participating in because there's nothing else to talk about on-field that's particularly exciting. For anyone who hasn't yet accepted it: The Bears are 100% drafting a QB. They just are. Justin is only sticking around going into year 5 if the Bears are ready to make a nine figure commitment to him to be the QB of the future. There's not a competent GM in the entire league that would sign off on that. That's a Daniel Jones contract on steroids. So he's gone. To play himself into a deal like that would take the greatest QB run any player has ever had over the second half of the year. So good luck hoping on that if JF is your guy.
Look, go ahead and have fun picking a side and bickering to pass the time, but don't take this shit too seriously. Next year it'll be Maye or Williams behind center and we can have some QB conversation around here actually worth a damn because the guy we're talking about will actually be around a while. For now, I'm just cheering on growth from young players we desperately need to improve (particularly in the trenches and secondary) and hoping with either our pick or Carolina's we're in good position to add whichever QB we want. The QB battle stuff is fun to get crazy over but it's ultimately not real. It's like going into the 2020 primaries and getting heated over Maryanne Williamson or Amy Klobuchar. Fields or T-Bag, you're putting your money on a horse that's simply not going to win.
I wonder what George S. Halas would say if he could see what his descendants have made of his once revered NFL franchise.
We played the worst pass defending team, worst screen defending team (which I hear we like to do), with only giving up 1 sack and a few pressures and this is what our passing offense looked like.
Want to feel worse?
According to Pro Football Reference, the Bears have played the third-easiest schedule in the league so far according to their strength-of-schedule algorithm. (Only the Dolphins and Bills have faced softer competition.)
By "SRS": (Simple Rating System) the Bears are the 4th-worst team in the league. Guess who's below them?
Washington
Denver
Las Vegas.
The Bears' SRS is -9.9. Here are the ratings of the remaining teams on the schedule:
My God. The Bears are going to play all the worst teams in the NFC by the end of the season (Minnesota post-Cousins, Green Bay, Carolina, Atlanta, Arizona, already played Washington...the only awful NFC team the Bears miss is the NY Giants, and the only really good NFC team they play is Detroit.
And even against this soft-ass schedule, they're going to win how many games, at most? 5? 6? And if the Bears finish up the season looking "better" in their final three games, THIS IS FOOL's GOLD. Do not fall for it.
Awful, awful, awful. Everyone should be fired. Even Poles.
It took our D2, backup, QB gettin slaughtered for a much-too-large percentage of this sub to figure out the obvious: It’s. The. Coaching.
I'm worried we might win against Carolina and or Arizona.
We absolutely want to win the panthers game and lose the cardinals game lol
All I say is if I saw fields played the way bagent did in his second nfl start as a ROOKIE I’d be a jf1 truther as well Hopefully fields learned something and plays well against the saints
Fields threw for 207 YDS 0 TD 1 INT and was 2 years younger than Bagent in his second career start.
It was this game: https://youtu.be/fu8fX9WhcMY?si=8tRDtYn8z1EEFTQp
He made some ridiculous throws in that Lions game. So, I’m not sure you’re being truthful. They won the game by the way.
It could have easily been 27-20 when we kicked the onside kick had we not gone for it on their 30 early in the second half and kicked 2 field goals when we had the chance.
We are halfway into the season, and there are STILL LARGE STRETCHES WHERE DJ MOORE DOES NOT GET TARGETED.
My post-game overreaction: Bears fans should be on our hands and knees begging the almighty to let us keep Justin Fields for as long as possible.
We all saw the team last night. To think that Fields has put up with this for 2+ seasons and NEVER complained, never checked out, never asked for a trade, only takes personal accountability and tries his best to keep improving... We should treasure this man, yet it seems that more than half of us want to drop him for a QB with objectively worse college stats and 3 fewer years of NFL experience.
Fields has lost a lot of games with this team, but he alone has made a majority of those games more competitive than they had any right to be.
Last night should be a wake up call moment for anyone who thinks conventional logic and reasoning can be applied to this team. This is not an NFL team.
Bernstein is going hard on the theory that Collinsworth was given talking points by the Bears yesterday like the "They'll have Fields analyze Bagent" comment
that's dumb as hell.
edit: let me expand on this. Has he never heard Collinsworth before?
I know he was out with a concussion for a bit, but has Roschon really done anything to show he's better than Herbert or Foreman? I think he's got energy and runs hard, but in all honesty, he might be the 4th best runner on the team behind Evans.
Why didn't we take a timeout at the end? Yes we were down 17 points, but there was 1:06 left in the game with 3 timeouts and the Chargers were going to punt. You let them run the clock down to 30ish seconds before they punted and then took a knee to end the game. We gave up.
Was that a call from Poles or Warren not to use our timeouts or was it Fluss' call? That sends a bad message to the team and to the fans. We surrendered. Even in the 49ers and Bengals game they were still trying to score with no time left and down by 10 points.
This city needs a Zodiac killer, but all his insane screeds to the police are about how inept this team is. The Chicago Bears Strangler.
We probably still lose yesterday, but the first few offensive drives were killed by fucking penalties. Pair that with the defense not being able to force a single first half punt and how the hell are we supposed to even come close to winning?
So many conversations about the QB position when the reality is that undisciplined football is the most blatant issue.