Pittsburgh Steelers QB Justin Fields was selected by the Chicago Bears in the first round of the 2021 NFL Draft. While there, he started 38 games, losing 28, and looking like a liability nobody wanted to take on. Despite his talent, the Bears couldn’t fetch much of an offer for him this offseason on the trade market.
The Steelers finally stepped up after Kenny Pickett requested they trade him, ultimately sending the Bears a conditional 2025 sixth-round pick. At this point, it’s looking like Fields will meet those conditions, which will raise it to a fourth-round pick. But that’s still looking like a bargain, which Broderick Jones believes is thanks in part to his new environment.
“He continues to grow”, he said of Fields after Sunday’s game, via Brooke Pryor of ESPN. “I feel like just because he’s a young player, folks think he really doesn’t know as much as he does. Chicago, he always really just had to lean on himself and just try and make those big plays. But here, I feel like he has more time to just settle down and just really break down or tear apart a defense”.
Most informed NFL fans view the Bears as one of the less stable franchises in the NFL right now. After all, they were the team that sent the Steelers a second-round pick for WR Chase Claypool. Even if many faulted the Bears for Justin Fields’ career trajectory, teams didn’t take the bait this offseason.
While the Bears claim that another team offered it a better deal for Fields than the Steelers gave them, I’m sure it still wasn’t much. For a former 11th-overall pick quarterback to fetch little more than a mid-round draft pick going into his fourth season, it is a stunning devaluation.
In Chicago, Justin Fields took a sack on 12.35 percent of his drop backs. That is 7.41 percent through three games with the Steelers. He is completing 73.3 percent of his passes, whereas he completed 60.3 with the Bears. He is on pace to approach his first career 3,000-yard passing season, though we should acknowledge he never played more than 15 games in any one season with the Bears.
Of course, we can’t forget that Fields is also still a young, growing player. After all, he is just 25 years old, and three years isn’t a long time for an NFL quarterback. Perhaps he wouldn’t be playing exactly as he is now if the Bears didn’t trade him, but it is reasonable to think he would have continued to grow. After all, he finished on a 6-2 run, earning 60 percent of his wins in 21 percent of his games.
But we can’t dismiss the impact the Steelers have had on Justin Fields, either. They have worked with his mechanics, stripping much of what he learned in Chicago and going back to the beginning. He is making smarter decisions, avoiding more negative plays, functioning within the offense. These are all signs of a player who knows he doesn’t have to do everything to have a chance to win. And that’s a feeling he never had in Chicago.
