The Bears are a bad football team. And they are going to win some games this year because there are several other bad football teams, and their schedule is laden with them.
Through the first month of this season, Matt Eberflus and Luke Getsy have called the games they believed they needed to call in order to win. They have operated with that singular mission It worked, twice. It failed, twice. But at 2-2 there are obvious truths about this 2022 team that need facing.
The Bears are not good. (If you embrace this point, you can skip the next few sentences.)
The Bears cannot compete with the better teams in the league.
The Bears are allowing Rutgers-level yardage on the ground.
The Bears don’t have a passing game.
The Bears have liabilities across their young roster.
The Bears have nothing to play for in 2022, except for 2023.
And this last point is why Flus and Getsy must transition from the “try to win games” approach to the “see what we have at quarterback” approach. If Justin Fields has any chance to be the future of the Chicago Bears at quarterback, the next 13 games have to be centrally focused on answering that question. If that means he throws a bad interception on 3rd and 16, so be it. If that means he bails on a pocket too early around the goal line and fails to score a touchdown, so be it. If that means the team loses a few games they should win, so be it. Playing offensive football, the way they are currently playing it, has zero – I repeat, ZERO – long-term benefits for this organization.
Great, you can run the ball. And you do it well. Let’s just assume you’ll still be able to run the ball next September. But this is 2022. You’re playing offense like Tallulah Bankhead is still gracing the Broadway stage. We know the offensive line and outside weapons will all be upgraded next off-season. That’s always been the plan. But none of that will matter if we head into next summer unsure of whether or not the quarterback can actually play the position at a professional level.
He shows flashes of good. He shows flashes of terrible. But those flashes are limited by his limited exposure within the flow of a football game. For the first month, that was fine. It was perfectly acceptable to find out if this group was capable of playing January football and prioritizing that quest. But this is not a good team. And it’s time to stop pretending they are.
And it’s also time to stop pretending that playing offensive football like it’s 1958 somehow is helping Justin Fields. It is time to put this offense on his back and see if he can carry it.
