What did Tyson Bagent’s three interceptions and one fumble mean Sunday?
That the Bears still don’t have a quarterback.
The hope — the fantasy? — was that Bagent would play well enough that the Justin Fields experience would mercifully end for everyone involved. But all the good that the fairy tale QB did in the first half Sunday was wiped out by a very bad second half in a 24-17 loss to the Saints.
Bagent’s fumble and two picks in the fourth quarter killed any hope of a Bears’ victory and any hope of his permanently wresting the starting job from the injured Fields.
It leaves the Bears in the same sinkhole they’ve been in for decades — without a quarterback who can take them higher.
That’s not to say Bagent won’t be a good one someday. It’s that he can’t be one now, three starts into his NFL career, and not with the group around him. The Bears won’t stand by while a former Division II quarterback makes rash mistakes on the job. There’s a performance level that’s expected in the league, and he didn’t meet it Sunday in the Superdome.
And that’s too bad. At halftime, he was 10-of-13 for 149 yards and two touchdowns. He threw a bad interception in the first quarter, but he more than made up for it with 60 rushing yards on six carries. He was everything that Fields hasn’t been in 2½ years — accurate with his throws, poised in the pocket and willing to go through his reads to find an open receiver.
Then the second half happened, which is like saying, “Then the airplane’s controls stopped working.’’ On his two fourth-quarter interceptions, one was a mistimed pass to Darnell Mooney, the other an off-target throw to Tyler Scott.
It was a strange second half in a lot of ways, but especially because he had been so good in the first half at throwing the ball away under pressure.
Accuracy, decision-making, patience — it had been all there.
And then it was gone.
“You can’t afford to take plays off in the NFL because it will come back to bite you,’’ he said. “So you’ve got to be sharp on every play.’’
Bagent is fearless, which is good, but he needs to understand that NFL cornerbacks aren’t D-II cornerbacks. The throws he might have been able to thread into receivers’ hands in college look like wrapped presents for adult defenders.
If Fields’ dislocated right thumb is better, he’ll start Thursday against the Panthers. In the grand scheme of things, it won’t matter. If he plays well, the Fields skeptics will say it’s because he was playing against lowly Carolina. If he doesn’t play well, the Fields cheering section will say it’s because his thumb wasn’t completely healed. It might seem like the guy can’t win, but that’s really not the story. The story is that we already know what he is midway through his third season.
The story is that he isn’t it. He isn’t the answer.
While the two entrenched sides of Bears fandom continue arguing over Fields’ abilities, the franchise wiggles off the hook for the terrible decisions it has made. On Sunday, the Texans’ C.J. Stroud, whom the Bears could have drafted this year if they hadn’t been so smitten with Fields, set the NFL single-game rookie record with 470 passing yards in a victory over the Buccaneers.
One sin begetting another.
Bagent called his second-half performance Sunday “embarrassing,’’ but it’s nothing compared to the Bears’ sad draft history. They’ll need to take a quarterback in the first round of next year’s draft. This is the bad dream that never ends. It’s the Nightmare on Elm Street, Oak Street, State Street and any Chicago street you care to mention.
The strangest part of the Bagent Era, short as it was, was how some Bears fans continued to have a death grip on the idea of Fields’ being good, even though nothing in his passing statistics deserved that level of ardor. And because they prayed that Fields be the quarterback they wanted him to be, it was as if they prayed for Bagent to fail. Possibly because they’d spent $100 each on a Fields’ jersey.
It’s cool to like Fields. It’s not cool to like a kid from Shepherd University. Somebody else will have to figure out that bizarre phenomenon.
But let’s not miss the bigger point here. The Bears and good quarterbacks? They don’t mix.
