(670 The Score) There will be plenty of time in the coming days and weeks to talk about how pointless the Bears' preseason win against the Dolphins was Saturday afternoon. There’s a certain banality in completely discarding meaningless football, even though, of course, the results quite literally don't matter. By this time Sunday, we’ll all have folded this game up nicely and put it in the back of the closet, because that’s what we’ve always been told to do with preseason football.
So consider this your obligatory disclaimer. Consider this your last moment on the solid ground of sanity, before we dive head-first into the deep end and indulge -- though maybe devour is the better word -- what fans saw with their very own eyes at Soldier Field: rookie quarterback Justin Fields can play a little bit.
Fields’ final box score stats landed somewhere in the gray area between good and great. Getting his first (semi-) real taste of professional football, he finished 14-for-20 for 142 yards and two total touchdowns -- his first on an eight-yard scramble, followed by the world’s easiest throw to tight end Jesse James on a well-schemed leak. Fields' first half had smug Packers fans tweeting about the impending decade of Bears incompetence, and his second half had smug Bears fans quote-tweeting them about the impending decade of Jordan Love. There’s plenty to work on -- though consistently throwing to top receiver Allen Robinson will probably help -- but it’s hard to look at the Bears’ first preseason game of 2021 and call it anything other than a resounding success. That is, unless you’re starting quarterback Andy Dalton.
“Everybody here is super excited about the way he played today,” coach Matt Nagy said of the 22-year-old Fields. “We all want the same thing. We understand the buzz, we understand the excitement. That’s why we drafted him. But we want to make sure we continue to go through this thing and we understand the process.”
“A natural, he’s a natural,” receiver Rodney Adams added of Fields. “He’s a leader. He commanded the huddle like he was supposed to, and he came out here and made plays. That’s what they brought him here for, and it showed.”
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Fields’ in-game demeanor was the talk of the Bears’ postgame press conferences. His pocket presence and command of the huddle were lauded by more than one of his teammates, and Fields himself even admitted that he wasn’t particularly nervous at any point. The game’s speed was surprisingly slow, he said -- a testament to hours spent practicing against a talented defense at Halas Hall. It wasn’t perfect though -- his fumble in the first quarter was a stark reminder of what life outside the pocket is like in the NFL.
“So, after that, I think I’m going to officially retire the spin move,” Fields said with a grin. “I don’t see that coming out any time soon. I just need to be smart with ball security and just slide or get out of bounds in that situation.”
It’s probably not a coincidence that Fields’ postgame press conference was five times as long as Dalton’s. Saturday’s plan never involved much of the latter, but it was easy to see that the team's conviction in him being the Week 1 starter has waned. At this rate, it’s going to be increasingly difficult for Nagy and the rest of the coaching staff to publicly convince Chicago that Fields needs more time to sit and wait. When asked point blank whether there’s anything that Fields can do to win the starting job before the team flies out to Los Angeles for Week 1, Nagy -- who looked about as excited as he ever has in a postgame media session -- didn’t entirely shoot down the idea.
“Just worry about tomorrow, baby,” he said. “Seriously. That’s all I want him to do. Make it really hard on all of us to understand that we have a really good quarterback in Justin Fields … Just worry about tomorrow. Just create great competition and be the best quarterback you can be for the Bears.”
Cam Ellis is a writer for 670 The Score and Audacy Sports. Follow him on Twitter @KingsleyEllis.