Not so secret Bagent man
Leave it to the Bears to go 80 years between stud QBs and now have two at the same time!
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Saturday is the all-important third NFL preseason game. It’s the one of the three fake games that is most like a real game. It’s so important that the Bears are going to play both of their superstar quarterbacks. Justin Fields and Tyson Bagent.
Leave it to the Bears to go 80 years between great quarterbacks and then end up with two of them on the roster at the same time.
You probably remember Fields. He’s the guy who nearly broke the all-time rushing record for quarterbacks last season. He’s legitimately the most fun Bears’ offensive player since the greatest football player of all-time retired in 1987.1 If that doesn’t ring a bell, he’s the one who weighs 13 pounds more than Donald Trump.
Fields played in the preseason opener and threw three passes, all of which were complete, and only one of which didn’t result in a touchdown. The Bears wanted him to get more efficient as a passer, and that’s a pretty good start.
He didn’t play in the second preseason game, and most of the Bears starters didn’t, and that made some Bears’ fans really angry, for some reason. I mean, Hub Arkush got pissy about it, but that’s just kind of Hub’s thing.
Anyway, few teams play any of their best players in the second week of the preseason, and the reason for that is that almost all of them schedule joint practices that week, like the Bears had with the Colts. They substitute the live game action of a preseason game for the more controlled live action of a practice.
And, that often times leads to teams beating the shit out of each other.
So much better.
But the biggest reason teams sit their better players in the second week is that not only is there one fewer preseason game than their used to be, there are no incremental cuts. It used to be the roster went down to 53 in three phases, and so by the second preseason game you had a slightly smaller roster. Now, you keep 80 until after the preseason is over and then you cut down, so teams use the second game as a way to see as much of the fringy guys as possible. And fans pay real money to go see it.
