Teddy Bridgewater: Chicago Bears
Lamar Jackson wasn’t the first quarterback out of Louisville in this decade to make serious waves in his second NFL season — there was also Bridgewater, whom the Vikings selected with the final pick in the first round of the 2014 draft. Bridgewater went to the Pro Bowl in the 2015 season, but then a severe knee injury cost him most of two seasons and led the Vikings to decline his fifth-year option. The Jets signed Bridgewater to a one-year deal in 2018 and wound up trading him to New Orleans, where he enjoyed a career resuscitation as Drew Brees’ backup, starting five games in 2019 when Brees was out with a thumb injury.
During that time, Bridgewater showed he had all the skills the Vikings once wanted, completing 67.9% of his passes for 1,384 yards with nine touchdowns and just two interceptions. The Saints won each of Bridgewater’s starts, and he proved that he has overcome an injury that would have been career-ending in previous eras. Bridgewater likely will be signed to a buyer-beware deal by his next employer, a team that will need certainty at the quarterback position. The Bears, who have beefed up their coaching staff in hopes of getting whatever they can out of Mitchell Trubisky, have until May to decide whether to pick up that fifth-year option. Meantime, Chicago with a limited window of potential championship success based on a formidable defense, would be an ideal landing spot.
Touchdown Wire editor Doug Farrar previously covered football for Yahoo! Sports, Sports Illustrated, Bleacher Report, the Washington Post, and Football Outsiders. His first book, “The Genius of Desperation,” a schematic history of professional football, was published by Triumph Books in 2018 and won the Professional Football Researchers Association’s Nelson Ross Award for “Outstanding recent achievement in pro football research and historiography.”