ESPN analyst Mike Tannenbaum has claimed that the Chicago Bears are doing serious damage to their quarterback Justin Fields with how they are dealing with protecting him.

Quarterback is a position that the Chicago Bears, for one reason or another, just can’t seem to get right. This isn’t even something that the eye test will tell you, although that will tell you quite a lot, as stats revealed last year show that Bears quarterbacks in the Super Bowl era (so going back to the mid-1960s), have some of the worst stats available.

The last great quarterback that the team had was arguably Jim McMahon, who was their quarterback when the team won the Super Bowl back in 1985. However, when you have to finish off the work laid down by the 85 Bears defence, widely regarded as the greatest defense of all time, a quarterback’s accomplishments might seem a lot greater than they are.

The latest man to try and turn that curse around was Justin Fields, who the Bears took with the #11 selection in the 2021 NFL Draft, and having had to fight with Andy Dalton to get the starting role, he didn’t exactly have a rookie season to remember, as he threw for 1,870 yards, completed just 58.9% of his passes and threw just 7 touchdowns against 10 interceptions. 

A chance to make amends

Now though he enters his second season, and having had a year to adjust to the league, how fast and physical it can be, then there’s always a chance that he could take a step forward and become a quarterback who can hang in the NFL.

But on current showing, that doesn’t look like it’s happening anytime soon, with his performance against the Seattle Seahawks in preseason a good example of that, as he went 5/7 and threw for just 39 yards in their 27-11 win, but it could well have been more had he not been under severe pressure when he was playing as this footage shows:

And it is that lack of protection that Mike Tannenbaum is worried about.

What’s he said?

Speaking on ESPN’s Get Up, he claimed that the Bears as an organisation were being ‘reckless’ with how they were handling him and that the team needed to get some serious protection in order to give him the best chance of succeeding:

With the draft already gone, the only chance they’ll have of getting some protection is by making a trade or by hoping they can coach up the current linemen between now and the start of the regular season. And you have to hope they can, because it would be a shame for such a young promising talent to have his career ruined so early on because of incompetence by those above him.