IF FIELDS AND BEARS GO 0-17, CHICAGO SHOULD JUST SAY “F IT” TO SPORTS

In a town where nothing goes right in the games of life, there’s a quarterback who must run because he can’t pass, which makes me wonder why fans finally haven’t rejected their losing franchises

     A county fairgrounds would work someplace in northern Illinois, where Justin Fields insists he’s playing “robotic” football. Isn’t the quarterback of the Chicago Bears a mutual impossibility anyway? Put him in front of a drill arcade game. Give him 20 shots for a minute. See how many he points he pops with nobody in the way.

     If he loses, make him the latest in the long line of losers at the most important position in sports. And if he wins at this point, do the same. Last year, we thought the team was transforming the role by letting Fields run irrationally every series. Turns out it’s all he could do in a place that thinks backwards, 20th-century style, and assumes a running back and middle linebacker are more cognitive gigs in 2023.

     “You know, could be coaching, I think," Fields said in a raucous week at Halas Hall. “At the end of the day, they are doing their job when they are giving me what to look at, but at the end of the day, I can't be thinking about that when the game comes. I prepare myself throughout the week, and then when the game comes, it's time to play free at that point. Thinking less and playing more.”

     So what do these missions mean as he heads Sunday into the playpen of Patrick Mahomes, who has perfected the art that Fields never will? "My goal this week is just to say ‘F it’ and go out there and play football how I know to play football,” Fields said. “That includes thinking less and just going out there and playing off of instincts rather than so much, say, info in my head, data in my head. Just literally going out there and playing football. Going back to it's a game and that's it. That's when I play my best, when I'm just out there playing free and being myself, so I'm going to, say, kind of bump … what I should, this and that, pocket stuff. I'm going to go out there and be me.”

     Whether that translates to an all-time turnover record, against a team that has won two Super Bowls in four years and whose tight end is dating Taylor Swift, at least makes Fields one of the oddballish stories in NFL lore. In a town already suffering the horrific woes of the White Sox and a potential choke job of the Cubs — yes, the top officer says the Sox should have stopped a game when two women were injured with gunfire, as ownership awaits lawsuits — Chicago now deals with a quarterbacking rescuer who can’t deliver the ball. All of which came in a blur when the team’s defensive coordinator, Alan Williams, suddenly resigned after missing last week’s loss in Tampa Bay.

     This led to reports that the FBI raided Williams’ home and the team’s practice facility in Lake Forest. All the Bears say is there was no raid on his home, which led host Pat McAfee to polish ESPN’s “journalistic” instincts. “Our sources told us that an FBI raid did occur on Alan Williams’ house,” McAfee said. “Any time you hear about an FBI raid happening, you assume (when) there's smoke there's a fire.”

     All of which forced Andrew M. Stroth, Williams’ lawyer, to say, “There’s absolutely no criminal activity. There’s no criminal allegations. There’s been no raid on Halas Hall. None of that is true — unequivocally, untrue … There’s no legal actions being taken against coach Williams. Coach Williams has a health challenge and he has some personal family matters, and he has decided with his family that he’s going to step away. … With much respect to the Chicago Bears, he decided to take a step back.” If Stroth is correct, ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro again will be hearing from his attorneys about his $18-million-a-year host.

     When Chicago teams are grotesque, everyone suffers. The team’s head coach, Matt Eberflus, must operate the defense and try to douse Fields’ mental processes. Neither is happening, with a 3-17 record next week possibly leading to his career unraveling as the Bears still — still, still, still — look for a new stadium. How many times have I asked if Chicago, the land’s No. 3 market, has the wherewithal to keep tolerating non-stop sports flubbery? The other morning, I pointed out the city’s “big-baller” teams are football and baseball, which might make Michael Jordan ponder a New York renaissance. The Bears, with their all-time quarterback futility, have won one Super Bowl since 1967. The Cubs have won one World Series since 1908 and can’t reject the Miami Marlins, who are averaging 10,000 in their unexpected postseason run. The White Sox have won one World Series since 1917, including games they gagged in 1919.

     Do kids in that region generally believe they always lose in life? Wondering what possibly is next at work, general manager Ryan Poles called an impromptu media conference and said no one in the organization views Fields as a “finger-pointer at all.” This is the boss who rejected a chance to trade him and take Bryce Young, C.J. Stroud or Anthony Richardson at No. 1. Now he’s heading down a path of how they locate Caleb Williams or Shedeur Sanders, though Williams’ father already has said a poor NFL circumstance will lead his son back to USC.

     “To hit it straight on, we have adversity right now. Slow start, 0-2, not where you want to be," Poles said. "We've dealt with life issues, we've dealt with injuries and that's all real and that's a part of what we do and what we've got to deal with. The beautiful thing about our philosophy here, our organization is we're solution-oriented. We work together to find these solutions and solve our problems to get everything back on track. To make it really, really clear, I know the outside noise, but no one in our building is panicking, no one is flinching. Not our owner, not our president, not our coach, not myself, none of our players — everyone's focused on solving the issues that we have so that we can be a better football team.”

     Better? Better than 3-14? When the circus is only regressing? “(Eberflus) and I were talking about we've both been through slow starts, rough starts and gotten things back on track — in our background, him with Indy in 2018, myself in Kansas City in 2015,” he said. “Sometimes you have these and you've got to fight through it and figure out how you can be a better football team.”

     Fields?

     “I can't be more clear than this: No one in our entire building, none of our coaches see Justin as a finger-pointer at all,” Poles said. “He has always taken ownership of anything that's happened on the field. He takes it head-on, he works, he grinds, he puts his head down, he works with his teammates, works with his coaches to find solutions.

     "Really everyone's trying to figure out what's going on. In my opinion, you've got a young quarterback trying to figure it out, a guy who hasn't had the cleanest start of his career, who last year with a roster had to put the team on the back, do some unbelievable things athletically. Now, he gets talent around him and has to figure and balance when to do those cool things athletically, when to lean on others, and that is sometimes a gray place to live in, and that takes time. That takes time on task for him to take that next step. Everyone's on board helping him get into that place for him to be successful.”

     Eberflus?

     “With Flus, got a ton of faith in Flus," Poles said. "He's a leader, he's done a great job. And then as a defensive play-caller, as well, got a ton of faith there. Is the situation easy, a sudden change easy? No, it's not. But he handled it well. He's leaned on his staff that has experience to help him get through that and be successful. We'll figure out all the titles and everything, I'm sure, next week. None of that's been dealt with right now. We'll get through this week.”

     Williams?

     “I don’t have many details to add there,” Poles said. “Halas Hall being raided is completely false. Don’t know where that came from.”

     With Fields, the situation is so ugly that even Mahomes was asked about it. “Trust your talent. Trust your instincts,” he said. “He’s here for a reason. He’s made a lot of big plays happen in the NFL and college, wherever he’s been. Just trusting in your instincts and then go out there be the player you’ve always been — just not against us, hopefully.”

     He laughed. Another ring of fatty tissue will arrive soon enough. Two NFL teams have gone 0-16 — the 2017 Cleveland Browns and 2008 Detroit Lions. No team has gone 0-17 since the league’s schedule was expanded.

     To the White Sox and the Cubs and the hazing at Northwestern, along with the post-Jordan mish-mash of the Bulls and internal wrongdoing of the Blackhawks, can you imagine if the Bears are looking at a zero?

     The mayor is new. But maybe he’ll call it Chicag-0.

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     Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.