If you zoom out and look at the entire history of the Chicago Bears, the franchise can be defined by and remembered for numerous different players and teams. Bronko Nagurski, Sid Luckman, and all of the players who made the Bears the best team of the first three decades of the NFL's existence. The 1963 team, the last which George Halas led to an NFL championship. Dick Butkus and Gale Sayers and the ‘what if's' of the late sixties and early seventies. Walter Payton, Mike Ditka and the '85 Bears defense leading the way to the team's only Super Bowl. Brian Urlacher, Lance Briggs and Chicago's brief renaissance in the 2000s. But for all the good, there's one dark cloud that hangs above the team… the fundamental inability to find a tried-and-true franchise quarterback.
For three years, Bears fans hoped and prayed that Justin Fields would prove to be the signal-caller who bucked this trend, and we can't sit here and pretend that Fields didn't show glimpses of being such a player. Say what you want about everything else Fields brings to the table, but what he could do with his legs, routinely turning broken plays into touchdowns, is a skill that very few quarterbacks possess. But deep down, by the end of year three of Justin Fields' time in Chicago, most Bears fans had reached the same conclusion: once again, this just wasn't the guy.
Well, it turns out, not everyone subscribes to this way of thinking. Steve Beuerlein, who was a back-up quarterback in Dallas when the Cowboys won the Super Bowl in 1992, made an appearance on The Bullpen With Adam Bull, a Cleveland Browns centric sports talk show, and discussed how he believed the Chicago Bears failed Justin Fields during Fields' three seasons in the Windy City.
“I think there were a lot of things working against him in Chicago. Mainly the instability and overall talent around him. Not being given the opportunity to grow in a system with a lot of weapons and different offensive philosophies that would fit him,” Beuerlein said during his appearance. “My big statement on this whole evolution of what happened with Justin Fields, I though the Bears made a huge mistake not trading that first pick. I think the Bears, if they trade away that first pick, commit to Fields for one more year… what they would've gotten in exchange for that first pick could've solidified that football team in a lot of areas, and prepared and set the table to go on a really nice run either this year or next year.”
Now not everything that Beuerlein says here is off-base. Any sane Bears fan would tell you that the weapons Chicago had put at Fields' disposal were not great. Yes, DJ Moore was there for one year — a year in which Moore set career highs in receptions, yards and touchdowns — and Cole Kmet is without question an above average tight end, and Darnell Mooney had his moments. But outside of that trio, Fields was throwing a lot of balls to guys like post-prime Allen Robinson, Damiere Byrd, Eqanimeous St. Brown, Chase Claypool, and Dante Pettis. To make matters worse, Fields was playing behind an iffy offensive line within an offense crafted by either Bill Lazor or Luke Getsy, two play callers who never seemed to grasp what they had in Fields.
Can Caleb Williams be a quarterback the Bears ‘Win Because Of'?
A month after Chicago drafted USC quarterback Caleb Williams with the 1st overall pick in the 2024 NFL Draft, Bears general manager Ryan Poles appeared on the The Adam Schefter Podcast, and shared with the NFL insider what went into the franchise's decision to move on from Justin Fields and more forward with Williams.
“We all know it’s a quarterback-driven league,” Ryan Poles told Adam Schefter. “You need a guy that puts you in position to win games. In scouting, we talk about, ‘win because of’ and ‘win with’ type quarterbacks. Those are the ones that you need to win championships.”
It doesn't require the assistance of a private investigator to reach the conclusion that with this statement, Poles was conceding that Justin Fields was a ‘win with' type of quarterback, while he believes that Caleb Williams is a ‘win because of' type of quarterback. Now in fairness to Fields, we'll never know what he could've done in Chicago with the supporting cast that Poles and co. have built for Caleb Williams. Williams walks into perhaps the best situation a #1 pick has ever stepped into. Thanks in large part to the previous regime's mismanagement of the roster, Fields never got that opportunity, and both he and the Bears suffered because of it.
