Bryce Young can be the sun, the moon, and the stars. The Heisman Trophy–winning quarterback out of Alabama is the betting favorite to be the first pick in the upcoming NFL draft, and that status alone—No. 1 pick who plays quarterback—confers a lot of status. NFL people clearly think Young could be great. But I think he’s more than a big bundle of potential. I think he’s going to fulfill that promise, because he’s a football assassin whose feel for the sport is otherworldly. The draft is an ocean of cautionary tales, but none of this is any fun at all if we aren’t allowed to fall in love with players we think are great.
The moment I gave myself to the Church of Bryce Young was in the second week of the 2022 season, at the end of a game against Texas. Alabama was in fourth-quarter danger of an upset loss when the Longhorns sent a cornerback blitz after the QB. Young should’ve been dead to rights, but he shook the more athletic defender off, turning a likely game-losing sack into a run for a first down that set up a winning field goal. That came at the end of one of Young’s least prolific college games. There were lots of other occasions for people to become Young zealots, games when he put up much bigger numbers and made equally stunning plays in high-pressure moments. Betting against Young having a long, prosperous NFL career seems silly. The tangible and intangible both point toward brilliance.
It should be simple, then, for the Chicago Bears to spend the first overall pick on Young. The Bears are terrible, and they have had an endlessly brutal QB situation for just about this whole century. In a vacuum, there should be no drama about who shakes Roger Goodell’s hand first on April 28 or which team’s jersey the two men hold up for the cameras. But life is complicated.
In fact, the Bears are probably not going to wind up taking Young at No. 1, as ESPN reported to start the week of the NFL Scouting Combine. The most quarterback-deprived franchise in the NFL is likely to pass on a QB who could change everything. And while Chicago not drafting Young would have the whiff of a front office outsmarting itself, the Bears might perversely be doing the right thing for themselves, Young, and the QB already on the roster whose presence is a big reason for all this uncertainty. The team’s situation is weird enough that attempting a bit of three-dimensional chess is not out of order.
Young is spectacular in ways that his very good numbers don’t fully get across. Alabama is a machine, and many quarterbacks during Nick Saban’s dynastic tenure there have gotten statistical boosts from playing in a supercharged offense. For much of his two-year run as the starter, Young was the supercharge. While other Bama QBs have had a rotating cast of elite future NFL stars at wide receiver, Young played this past season with the most nondescript wideout corps his school has had in ages. (He had two great receivers the year before, but both got hurt in the postseason, and Young’s lack of great targets at that point was a big reason Georgia beat Alabama to win the first of back-to-back national titles.) Some of Alabama’s offenses have been masterfully designed in ways that everyone could see. The past two years’ offenses weren’t that way, and the offensive coordinator, Bill O’Brien, was the subject of all the usual yelling that comes when a unit seems as if it’s underperforming. Alabama still scored 41 points per game in 2022 because, when you have Young, it’s just not possible for things to go all that wrong.
The reason for skepticism about Young’s NFL future is out of his control: He is not a big dude. Alabama listed him at 6 feet, and it may soon become clear that the Tide’s measurement was accurate only in the tippy-toes sense. There have been great NFL QBs in Young’s height range (Drew Brees and Russell Wilson, for example), but they are few. Young has a slight build that lends itself to reasonable fears about how he’ll handle getting beaten up by NFL defenders. He isn’t a dropback-passing giant like Trevor Lawrence or Justin Herbert, and he isn’t a dual-threat bulldozer like Jalen Hurts. I mostly roll my eyes at this line of commentary, because a special player is a special player, whether he’s big or not. But it’s not nothing, and you can picture a world where Young is injured a lot and doesn’t develop optimally.
A different QB’s development comes into play too. The Bears took Justin Fields with the 11th pick in 2021. Fields was about as compelling a prospect then as Young is now: a former five-star recruit who’d been hugely successful at a blue-blood college program in a hard conference (Ohio State in the Big Ten, in his case) and who had few attributes not to love. Fields’ first two years in the NFL have been mostly bad. He’s thrown interceptions on 3.6 percent of his throws, more than any other regular starter over that time. The Bears have frequently sputtered around him, and a month into last season, Fields and his team were locked in a battle over who could fail the other more comprehensively. But things got a lot better as the year went on. Fields became one of the most prolific running QBs the league has had in a while and finished the season with more than 1,100 yards on the ground. He showed flashes as a passer too, most notably when he had a big day in a loss to the Green Bay Packers (the archrival the Bears are eternally trying to be respectable against) in Week 13. Fields finished a respectable 17th in ESPN’s QBR, a stat that bakes in rushing as well as passing efficiency. He had been dead-last 31st among qualifiers in his rookie year. His overall passing numbers are bad, but not bad enough to obscure that Fields is on an upward arc.
Fields, at a listed 6-foot-3 and 228 pounds, carries none of the size quibbles that Young does. He’s a running asset in a way Young will never be. Young is probably a more valuable prospect—again, in a vacuum—but growing into an NFL career is a process for everyone. Fields has already spent two years in the crucible that is “playing football for the Chicago Bears,” and they have been hard, but he’s gotten a lot better. The Bears remain terrible, and it’s not clear that Young would have a more enjoyable first few years in Chicago than Fields has had. Fields’ second-year improvement came under a new coach, Matt Eberflus, and a new offensive coordinator, Luke Getsy. The team would be ripping out valuable continuity for an upgrade that might not actually be an upgrade, as certain as I am that Young has the juice to be a star. Young’s size is a small reason to look elsewhere, but the much better reason is that Fields exists. Even after two rocky years, one doesn’t have to strain to imagine Fields taking the Bears to the playoffs and, one day, being a Pro Bowl–caliber QB.
Rostering both QBs is a waste of resources, so the Bears’ options are simple. They can keep Fields and draft someone else, maybe the absurd Georgia defensive tackle Jalen Carter, with the first pick. They can trade Fields and pick Young. (They could also draft a QB who isn’t Young, but let’s assume they don’t.) Or general manager Ryan Poles can send off the first pick for the most handsome ransom he can find, as current reporting indicates he’ll do. Trading picks is a little easier than trading players, anyway, because picks don’t have preexisting contracts attached to them. The first overall pick should bring back another high first-round pick and a fruit basket of other picks. The Bears have dozens of problems, and Fields’ progression in 2022 gives them the option of addressing several at once instead of pressing the reset button at QB.
No matter what the Bears do, they’ll be risking long-term embarrassment. No team wants to be the one who could’ve drafted Peyton Manning and didn’t. But it’s only mildly more appealing to be the team that traded Brett Favre before Favre’s career truly got started, as the Atlanta Falcons did in 1992. The looming specter of humiliation is the cost of doing business in the NFL, and it could take years for the Bears to ascertain if the call they made this spring was the right one.
Being made to pick between QBs of this caliber is a good problem. For as long as anyone playing in the NFL today has been alive, Bears passers have topped out at levels somewhere between Jim McMahon (a fine-enough QB who happened to play on a 1985 team with Walter Payton and the best defense in the history of football) and Jay Cutler (a fine-enough QB who did not play on the ’85 Bears). Chicago quarterback play has been a barely interrupted parade of misery for decades, with all due respect to the Nickelodeon Valuable Player honor Mitchell Trubisky took home in the 2020 season’s playoffs. Soon enough, Bears fans are going to learn what it’s like to have a genuinely good NFL quarterback leading their offense. And if it doesn’t happen soon, at least the faithful can stop hoping that it ever will.
NFL Draft: The Chicago Bears' Bryce Young vs. Justin Fields dilemma. - Slate
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