How Matt Nagy failed Justin Fields

Bears head coach Matt Nagy sent rookie quarterback Justin Fields out to sea with a boat full of anchors against the Browns. The tape tells the story.

There are coaches who are highly regarded for their ability to develop and bring the best out of quarterbacks. Andy Reid of the Chiefs is certainly one, and that’s been the case for decades — certainly during his time with the Eagles from 1999 through 2021, as well. When the Bears hired former Chiefs offensive coordinator Matt Nagy in 2018, they were obviously under the assumption that Nagy had picked up enough from Reid to right a quarterback situation that hasn’t been above league average since World War II, and most of the time, “league-average” would be damning the Bears with faint praise. Nagy had been with Reid since 2008 as a coaching intern with the Eagles, and he’d moved his way up to offensive quality control, then quarterbacks coach, then offensive coordinator. Were Nagy to turn out to be some sort of schematic and philosophical fraud, you could give the Bears the benefit of the doubt — if Andy Reid trusted this guy this much, why shouldn’t we?

We’re now three games into the fourth season of the Matt Nagy Experiment, and it’s worse than it’s ever been. No quarterback under Nagy has been able to maintain even a middle-tier combination of efficiency, explosiveness, and efficiency. Even after Nagy, offensive coordinator Mark Helfrich, and offensive assistant Brad Childress were able to help Mitchell Trubisky to a 24-touchdown, 12-interception season in 2018, Trubisky started to regress as the coaching staff under Nagy changed. Then, it was the decision to add Nick Foles to the roster, which has been another exercise for which the Bears have seen very little. Before the 2021 season, Chicago signed veteran placeholder Andy Dalton to a one-year, $10 million contract, and then traded up in the draft to select Ohio State’s Justin Fields with the 11th overall pick.

As expected, this has also been a disaster. Through the preseason, Nagy planted Dalton with the starters and kept Fields with the backups until the final preseason game. Despite that, Fields proved more able in every possible category — from operating under pressure to throwing the deep ball. Dalton remained the starter on a no-matter-what basis until he suffered a knee injury against the Bengals in Week 2 that now has him week-to-week.

So, it was time for Fields to start in Week 3 against the Browns. At the same time Nagy was telling everyone that Dalton would be the starter going forward no matter what Fields did, he was ignoring the playbook for his young quarterback in a truly epic fashion.

The results were entirely predictable. In a 26-6 thrashing by the Browns, Fields completed six of 20 passes for 68 yards, no touchdowns, no interceptions, nine sacks for 67 lost yards, and a quarterback rating of 41.2.

How bad was it? Historically so.

Two of ESPN’s better analysts, former NFL quarterback Dan Orlovsky and former head coach and defensive coordinator Rex Ryan, excoriated Nagy in Sopranos fashion.

“The Chicago Bears should fire Matt Nagy today.” Orlovsky said. “Because yesterday’s game plan, which was the worst one I’ve ever seen in my life, was either negligence or intentional. It’s been 149 days since the Bears drafted Justin Fields. You had 149 days to start to build a game plan around the skill set of this young man. And it was an embarrassment. Justin Fields threw the ball 20 times yesterday. 13 times, the Bears went with five-man protection, with no help for their offensive line. Yesterday, [Nagy] showed us that [he] is either incapable of designing the proper game plan around a dynamic young quarterback, or [he] showed us that it was intentional. That you wanted him to fail, and you set him up to be a disaster.”

Ryan then chimed in.

“I told you so! I told you three years ago! You’re wasting a championship-level… maybe not a championship-level, but a good defense, and this guy has no creative thing. I’m a dumb defensive coach, right? I’m so dumb, I’m going to drop back 30 times, and go 21 times with five-man protection. Are you out of your mind? I wouldn’t do that with Tom Brady. This is absolutely ridiculous. And I said it from Day 1. I loved Mitchell Trubisky. [Nagy] never gave him a damned chance. You won Coach of the Year riding the back of that kid, and then you threw his ass away. And how you also have Nick Foles. Great job. You got a guy who’s proven not to be an NFL starter. And this is your decision. You drafted a guy with unbelievable ability, and you’re going to go out there and get him killed. I don’t get it.”

Trubisky, by the way, equaled Fields’ passing yardage total of one net yard with one completion as the Bills’ mop-up quarterback.

As Orlovsky pointed out, the Bears moved the pocket just once in the first half. Orlovsky also pointed out that Nagy’s third-down calls were far too repetitive, and the tape doesn’t lie.

“When you look at games like this with the competitor in you, it’s hard with numbers like this to where we are offensively,” Nagy said after the game. “The competitor in you gets frustrated, but at the same point in time, I think that’s probably one of my greatest strengths is my care and want to get this thing fixed. You have to rebound back. Staying positive with the coaches and the players, when you have guys that do care, and you have guys that want to get better. They do it for each other. They don’t do it for themselves, and that’s where I’m going to come at this thing from and understand that we get to play another game next Sunday against a division opponent. When we get back to the facility, back at Halas Hall, get to the why’s and then fix it and move on.”

On Monday, Nagy made his response to the “why’s” pretty clear, if entirely confusing.

Detailing everything that went wrong with the plan would require a small book, but let’s get forensic with a few of the primary issues.