Oh no. Not the dreaded passive-aggressive unfollow of one of your team’s official social media accounts. I love me some Justin Fields, but this ain’t it.
What makes it a worse look for the Chicago Bears quarterback is that he still follows the team on X/Twitter, which just adds to the confusion. Ope. Scratch that. Our guy Dave has cleared up that part for us. He would know, too, if Fields didn’t follow the Bears on Instagram in the first place.
For a second, I wasn’t going to blow this out of proportion. Maybe there’s some complex mixed-signal gaslighting Fields was trying to deploy with a touch-and-go, hot-and-cold approach to following the Bears across different platforms. Alas, looks like it’s unofficially Caleb Williams No. 1 overall pick SZN in the Windy City, despite Merril Hoge’s protests.
I mean, I guess I can hate on Fields for doing this, but didn’t Kyler Murray once scrub his IG of anything Arizona Cardinals-related, and then get paid a bazillion dollars? I believe he did. That was funny. Not throwing shade at Kyler, by the way. Those days are over for me. One look at the Cardinals’ NFLPA report card and you wonder how anyone could succeed out in the desert.
Back to Justin Fields. Tough day to be a member of his fan club, I imagine.
This young man deserves to have fans, to be clear. But come on, Justin. Pretty much every football fan loves you, thinks you’re a good dude, wants to see you succeed, and thinks you’ve gotten screwed in Chicago. Let’s face it, the Bears have never successfully developed a franchise quarterback.
For all the times Fields has taken the high road with very few exceptions, though, he went for this dig on social media. Sorry, it doesn’t land with me. If that makes me sound like an old curmudgeonly man, so be it.
Since I’ve broken down Caleb Williams quite a lot around these parts and will do so several more times over before the 2024 NFL Draft kicks off, let’s focus on the Fields angle of it all.
There are obvious QB-needy teams toward the top of the draft order. Washington will probably pick a blue-chip college prospect at No. 2 overall. The Patriots might not at No. 3 because they’re the Patriots. It’d be the most Patriots thing to ever Patriot if they ran it back with Bailey Zappe, Mac Jones or, like, Jimmy Garoppolo. Also wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest. For New England’s sake, hopefully it’s the true dawn of a new era there. Or not. Haven’t they won enough?
Anyway, then you have Atlanta at No. 8. I could see the Falcons bringing Fields aboard for a trial run. Otherwise, unless Kirk Cousins does indeed price himself out of Minnesota, I struggle to see an obvious landing spot where Fields could come in and be the surefire starter without a real competition.
Nor does it make much sense for the Bears to keep Fields from a pure financial standpoint, never mind that Williams seems like a far superior prospect to Fields when he came out of Ohio State and that it’s been widely reported it’d take a lot for the Bears to trade the No. 1 pick in the first place.
Every logic-based neuron inside my cranium tells me that neither the Broncos (12th overall pick) nor the Raiders (13th) will roll into 2024 in the AFC West with Fields under center when they have to face Patrick Mahomes and Justin Herbert twice apiece.
That leaves the Pittsburgh Steelers, who’ve sported a dinosaur offensive scheme in recent years, hired a fun-hating fired head coach in Arthur Smith as their new play-caller, and are currently torn between (and stubbornly loyal to) the likes of Kenny Pickett and Mason Rudolph. Whether Pittsburgh re-signs Rudolph in free agency to compete with their 2022 first-round pick Pickett, or would hypothetically opt to bring Fields aboard instead, it just all sounds very, very complicated.
Saying all that about potential landing spots to say this: Justin Fields should be doing every single thing possible to cast himself in the best light he can. Whether he popped off in frustration with this Bears IG snub if and when he found out they were moving on from him, or just got that sense by reading between the lines, there was zero benefit to doing this.
It’s a seemingly trivial thing to do, yet it’s a very public gesture that paints him as petty. Not what you want. And Fields doesn’t strike me as someone who’d 4D-chess a scheme to cast himself in a poorer light as a means of sinking his own trade value for when Chicago eventually does send him elsewhere.
Can we just fast-forward to free agency? I know Super Bowl Sunday was only, like, a week ago. Let’s get a move on. Rip the Band-Aid off. Somebody get Justin Fields away from the Bears so he can be better positioned to realize his potential.
