Yes, the Bears Should Consider Drafting a Quarterback with the No. 1 Pick

Teams should never be satisfied at the league's most important position, as early career promise rarely translates to long-term success

This is not clickbait, this is not a galaxy-brain take, this is not intentionally cynical or provocative. If you view it in that manner, you probably can’t be convinced otherwise.

I’m all for thoughtful criticism, but critiques that assume certainty in their premise don’t fit that bill. That’s mostly what you’ll hear when you even suggest a team consider drafting a quarterback when they have a young one who has shown any promise on their roster: “You can’t do that”, “That’s setting them up for failure”, “That doesn’t make sense”, or “That’s football stupid” (Not sure how football stupid differs from regular ole’ stupid, but I admit it adds a touch of pizzaz).

There’s a never-ending list of judge, jury and executioner arguments that people love to throw out there without being bothered to present any evidence in support. I suggest you don’t play in that game; It’s a waste of time. Let’s focus on being measured and let the evidence take us in the right direction.

In the spirit of Vikings general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah, this is about being thoughtful and intentional. If your team has the No. 1 pick in the NFL draft, in a year with multiple quarterbacks consistently ranked in the top-5 prospects, and you don’t consider drafting a quarterback, then you either already have a young, MVP-level signal-caller or you’re not fulfilling your duty to the team’s owner, players, coaches and fans.

I laid out much of the argument for why teams should never be satisfied at the quarterback position in this article on why the Eagles drafthttps://www.pff.com/news/draft-jalen-hurts-wasnt-a-good-pick-by-the-philadelphia-eagles-he-was-a-great-oneing Jalen Hurts was a great pick. Taking a quarterback No. 1 overall and taking one in the second round isn’t the same context, but the philosophy holds. Here’s what I said at the time of the Hurts pick, when the overwhelming majority of analysts thought it was a waste for the Eagles to pass up maximizing the roster around Carson Wentz.

Instead of checking a box and assuming the position is filled, teams need to constantly assess what they have at quarterback and how best to increase their chances of having the highest level of play. Far too many front offices are willing to sit and hope that quarterbacks who have shown flashes will turn into consistently elite players, even if the likelihood was never high and is decreasing every season.

Even the biggest Fields fans now aren’t as certain that he’s the guy for the Bears as Eagles fans were about Wentz post-2017, when he finished at No. 3 overall on the NFL100 list (behind only Tom Brady among quarterbacks) and finished third in MVP voting, despite missing the last three games of the season.

WE RARELY KNOW WHAT WE HAVE AT QUARTERBACK

Carson Wentz going from near-MVP to being run out of town two years later isn’t the norm, but it’s not extraordinarily unusual either. If we look at the quarterbacks drafted since 2010 who “earned” multiple starting seasons, there are a ton of misses who once showed promise.

I’ll put these quarterbacks into two categories based on the high point of popular perception after their second seasons: “I think we found the guy” or “I think we might have the guy”.

I THINK WE FOUND THE GUY

• Sam Bradford (No. 1 pick, OROY)

• Cam Newton (No. 1 pick, OROY, Pro Bowl as rookie)

• Andrew Luck (No. 1 pick, Second in OROY voting, Pro Bowl years 1-2)

• Robert Griffen III (No. 2 pick, OROY, Pro Bowl as rookie)

• Russell Wilson (Third in OROY voting, Super Bowl in second season, Pro Bowls years 1-2)

• Colin Kaepernick (Super Bowl appearance in second season)

• Jameis Winston (No. 1 pick, Second in OROY voting)

• Marcus Mariota (No. 2 pick, 8th in dropback efficiency in second season)

• Jared Goff (No. 1 pick, Pro Bowl and led the NFL in dropback efficiency in second season)

• Carson Wentz (No. 2 pick, 3rd in MVP Voting, Second-Team All-Pro and Pro Bowl in second season)

• Dak Prescott (OROY, 6th in MVP voting, Pro Bowl in first season)

• Patrick Mahomes (MVP in second season)

• Deshaun Watson (Third in OROY voting, Pro Bowl second season)

• Lamar Jackson (MVP in second season)

• Kyler Murray (No. 1 pick, OROY, Pro Bowl in second season)

As of now, we can say with decent confidence that seven of the quarterbacks we thought were the guy ended up being high-level franchise quarterbacks: Newton, Luck, Wilson, Prescott (maybe), Mahomes, Watson and Jackson. Murray is still a question mark for me, and the remaining seven didn’t fit the bill. So we’re talking about a 50% hit rate for those assumed early career hits, and this is after having seen them perform well in the NFL for multiple seasons.

WE MIGHT HAVE THE GUY

• Andy Dalton (Second in OROY voting, Pro Bowl as rookie)

• Ryan Tannehill (No. 8 pick)

• Blake Bortles (No. 3 pick)

• Teddy Bridgewater (Pro Bowl in second season)

• Mitchell Trubisky (No. 2 pick, Pro Bowl in second season, Playoffs in second and fourth seasons)

• Baker Mayfield (No. 1 pick, Second in OROY voting, Division Round appearance in third season)

• Sam Darnold (No. 3 pick)

• Josh Allen (No. 7 pick, Playoffs in second season)

• Daniel Jones (No. 6 pick)

For this cohort, I’d put the actual hits at one out of nine, or 11% (only Allen). If the Bears moved forward with Fields and didn’t bring in quarterback competition the next couple seasons, I think this is the cohort he’d belong to after the two seasons he’s had to start his career.

Fields has accomplished less in terms of credentials (awards, playoffs) than Dalton, Bridgewater, Trubisky, Mayfield and Allen. He was also a lower draft pick (11th) than Tannehill, Bortles, Darnold and Jones. There is little historical evidence that we should think there’s better than a coin flip’s chance Fields is the long-term answer. If anything, it’s a lot lower than that.

Fields’ overall efficiency this season is 22nd of 31 quarterbacks with at least 300 dropbacks and designed runs (+0.03 EPA per play), after finishing 30th as a rookie. His numbers look better by my adjusted efficiency metric that accounts for receiver quality, blocking and other contextual factors, but it’s still middle of the pack at 16th.

FIELDS HAS IMPROVED, BUT IS IT SUSTAINABLE?

Fields is now near the middle of the league in efficiency when you adjust for his circumstances, which isn’t bad for a second-year quarterback who could improve down the road.

But looking further into the way Fields produced this season reveals a lot of questions about the sustainability of his big-play reliance.

If you compare Fields’ unadjusted efficiency as a rookie to this year by play-type, it reveals that he’s actually been less efficient as a passer in this second season, even excluding interceptions and sacks.

All of Fields’ improvement has come from increasing his rushing production and fewer fumble lost. But Fields hasn’t improved his propensity to fumble this season. His 15 fumbles lead all players, yet he’s had the good fortune to only lose two (tied for 28th). I’m sure some of that is driven by muffed snaps and other fumble types that have higher recovery potential, but that can’t explain the entire disconnect. Good ole’ luck has played a big role, something we can’t be confident will continue.

We should also be skeptical that’s Fields will continue producing the highest scrambling and rushing EPA per play we’ve ever seen (0.22 EPA per total plays). Outlier results tend to regress, even for the most talented players.

But dividing his EPA production by the length of his runs reveals another layer of instability in his 2022 production.

Four Fields’ runs of 40-plus yards accounted for almost 40% of his scrambling and rushing EPA. Lamar Jackson was the second highest at 17% (only one run of 40-plus), while Josh Allen and Jalen Hurts were around 5%. I don’t think it’s going out on a limb to say that Fields will not continue to produce outlier plays at the same rate as we saw this year, even if he is a uniquely extraordinary athlete, which I think he is.

YOU HAVE TO BUILD AROUND THE QUARTERBACK WITH THE STATE OF THE CURRENT BEARS ROSTER

The Bears definitely have a bad team around the quarterback. The Bears have some of the worst receivers in the NFL, and their defense hasn’t held an opponent to below average efficiency since Week 7. The offensive line isn’t great, but their PFF run and pass blocking grades rank third and 15th, respectively; It’s not the dire situation many think. Fields is responsible for most of his league-worst sack rate.

The quarterback surroundings will certainly be worse if the Bears don’t trade back and acquire multiple high-value picks in the process, while still likely drafting in the top-10. But I think there is a lot to consider that can mitigate that cost.

First, the Bears will have over $100 million in cap space this offseason, which will help bring depth, including receivers that a better passing quarterback can derive more value from.

Second, adding a quarterback doesn’t render Fields worthless. If Fields is a valuable player, all you need is two interested parties to get full value for him on the trade market. I wouldn’t advocate immediately trading Fields, but instead having a competition. But if it comes to eventually trading Fields, he won’t be a serious discount unless he never had trade value in the first place. Plenty of players who teams have decided to move on from got full value in the market because teams bid against each other. If you have two interested teams, they continue to bid up to the market value without considering your need for the player.

If the aforementioned Carson Wentz can get traded once for a contingent first-round pick after being arguably the worst quarterback in the NFL the prior season, then again for multiple picks after another team wanted nothing to do with him, there’s no evidence a quarterback’s trade value is materially damaged when his current team goes in a different direction at the position.

Third, finding a long-term franchise quarterbacks isn’t only about this cycle of the franchise. The right quarterback will put a team in playoff position for 10-15 years, during which the rest of the roster will be turned over multiple times, outside of a few key non-quarterback contributors.

You shouldn’t force a quicker rebuild around the quarterback with so much uncertainty about that quarterback, especially if he only has two years left on the lower-cost rookie contract. If isn’t the biggest factor, but drafting a quarterback in 2023 resets the rookie contract clock, giving the Bears more time for draft picks to mature and find the right mix in free agency.

WHAT IF FIELDS IS A BETTER PROSPECT THAN ANYONE IN THE 2023 CLASS?

I have a suspicion this will be the most popular rebuttal to the idea that the Bears should take multiple shots at young, elite quarterback prospects: Why waste a valuable pick on a prospect you don’t believe is better?

Billy M @BillyM_91

Old takes expose me if I’m wrong, but Bryce Young and Stroud are NOT better prospects or players than Justin Fields.

It’s a logical argument. If you can only start one quarterback at a time, why add a lesser one to the one you already have? But what if I told you that there’s a good reason to draft a Bryce Young or C.J. Stroud even if you believed neither is as good of a prospect or player? The point of listing out all the possible franchise quarterbacks above was to show how little we know about how good a quarterback will be, even after seeing them in the NFL for multiple seasons.

Every player is not a stationary talent that we can identify. Every player has a range of outcomes for their future career, even if we were able to perfectly assess how they have played up until this point. Players grow, players fade, players get injured, players mesh with different coaches and different surrounding differently. You combine that with the fact that we don’t have perfect assessments - in fact, we’re not really close most of the time - and you can see the value in having multiple paths to success, even if one is hazier now than the other.

Here’s another section from my Jalen Hurts piece explaining that drafting a quarterback with half the likelihood of being an elite starter can still increase the chance significantly of finding the most valuable asset in professional football:

If we assume Hurts is half as likely as Wentz to be a top-12 or top-6 quarterback …. adding him to the quarterback room with Wentz raises the chance that the Eagles have a top-6 quarterback to 28% from 20%, or a 40% increase. In terms of finding a top-12 quarterback, the Eagles' probability with both quarterbacks rises to 72% from 60%, a 20% increase.

IF THIS IS THE RIGHT MOVE, WHY DON’T TEAMS DO IT MORE OFTEN?

I get the logic: things that aren’t being done, aren’t being done for a reason. Most often, it’s the right logic to avoid what others have learned to avoid over years of trial and error. But that doesn’t mean it’s always correct to avoid what hasn’t been done, especially when those ideas have rarely been tried. And the circumstances when you’re willing to think through and do the right thing when others aren’t, you gain a massive advantage over your competitors. I believe drafting multiple top prospects is one of those value-added ideas that isn’t being tried enough.

Teams haven’t tried (often) to develop two young, elite prospects at the same time. But the lack of evidence doesn’t mean, as many claim, that it definitively won’t work. In fact, the closest historical analogy to what Bears would be doing if they take a quarterback with the No. 1 pick was one of the biggest successes in NFL history. We call the NFL a copycat league, yet it’s common wisdom to dismiss an idea employed with historically positive results.

In the 1989 offseason, the Dallas Cowboys had the No. 1 overall pick after finishing 3-13 in the final season of legendary head coach Tom Landry. New owner Jerry Jones fired Landry and replaced him with former college teammate Jimmy Johnson. The Cowboys used their No. 1 overall pick to draft Troy Aikman, but then broke the mold by also taking top quarterback prospect Steve Walsh in the 1989 supplemental draft with the second overall pick. Not only were the Cowboys trying to develop two top quarterback prospects at the same time, they drafted them the same exact offseason.

Walsh started a number of games in his rookie year while Aikman recovered from injury, but the team bereft of talent was even worse in their rookie year, going 1-15 and again finishing last for the second year in a row. Because the Cowboys chose to use a first-round pick in the 1989 supplemental draft, they forfeited their 1990 first round pick, which would have, again, been first overall. The Cowboys spent not one, but two overall No. 1 picks on quarterbacks.

If a poor Bears team using a single No. 1 pick on a quarterback two year after using the No. 11 early would relegate them to failure - as you’ll see stated evidence-free often - the Cowboys must have been doomed. Instead, they were able to develop one of those quarterbacks into a Hall of Famer, win three Super Bowls and have one of the greatest decades in NFL history.

They were even able to move on from Walsh and reap strong returns with a trade to the New Orleans Saints midway through the 1990 season. The Cowboys got a first, second (conditional first if Walsh performed well) and third round pick in exchange for Walsh, which disproves another common assumption that a quarterback who loses a competition to another high-end talent will have to be traded at a significant discount.

The Bears won’t likely see the same level of success as the Cowboys did with their unconventional strategy, but at least we can definitively say that claims it can’t work are wrong and vastly overconfident.

HISTORIC OPPORTUNITIES CAN’T BE WASTED

The bar for bringing in legitimate competition at the quarterback position is far too low. Every recent first-round pick shouldn’t have multiple years of a competition-free environment to prove they’re the future. In fact, there’s no reason to think a highly drafted quarterback should be given the space to play himself out of the position, instead of forcing them to play into the position with strong performance against real competition.

For all the talk of later-round quarterback picks having success, the young ones we can all agree are nearly certain to maintain success were exclusively drafted in the top-10 picks of the first round: Patrick Mahomes (10th), Josh Allen (7th), Joe Burrow (1st), and Justin Herbert (6th). The Bears might not have another bite at the top quarterback prospect apple for a generation If Fields continues to play at or around his current level, with rushing value supporting weaker passing numbers and the team using boatloads of cash and picks to support his good-not-elite performances.

The Jags and Titans passed up Mahomes and Watson in 2017, at least partially, because they took top quarterback prospects in 2014 and 2015, respectively. The Commanders and Giants passed on Herbert in 2020, at least partially, because they drafted top quarterback prospects in the 2019. The Bears shouldn’t lock themselves into making the same mistake, and instead maximize their fleeting chance to solve the most important position in sports.