Chicago Bears quarterback Justin Fields Credit: Mike Dinovo-USA TODAY Sports
FeaturedNFLBy Jay Rigdon on

As a young Chicago Bears fan/general sports obsessive, I spent a lot of time watching the NFL Draft.

I’m not sure why it had so much appeal to me, or why I vividly remember being ten years old and watching Orlando Pace be taken first overall in 1997. (As an aside: what an awful draft for the Bears! They traded the 11th overall pick for one year of Rick Mirer. Picks #12 and #13 that year: Warrick Dunn and Tony Gonzalez. Chicago then proceeded to spend the rest of the draft acquiring players who failed miserably. Their only draft pick that year to do much of anything notable in professional sports was eventual MMA fighter Bob Sapp.)

The point of that entire introduction (if there is one), is that I will always have a soft spot for the NFL Draft. Back then it was one of the rare main events that took place on a weekend afternoon; that’s important when you’re in elementary school. This year, for the first time in my life as a fan, one of my teams has the #1 overall draft pick.

I hate it. So much.

It doesn’t help that this year isn’t filled with generational prospects on both sides of the ball. (Please check back in on me in a few months when the Indiana Pacers have, like, the sixth-best odds of moving up for Victor Wembanyama.) But what hurts worst is that the Bears, for the first time in my fandom, also have an impossibly likable quarterback with plenty of tools and promise. It’s impossible to describe how well Justin Fields played given the rest of the roster, a team designed to clear out future cap room and lose as many games as possible.

Fields was almost too good; the Bears outperformed their talent by a wide margin thanks in large part to his ability to do things on his own, which he did far more often than is usually possible at the NFL level. Could any of the quarterback prospects this year end up having a better career than Fields? Sure. It’s possible. No one really knows anything about drafting quarterbacks.

But Fields has shown more than enough to deserve a chance with an actual NFL roster around him. In fact, at this point, trading him would be such an obvious setback to the franchise that no one seems to really take it seriously as a possibility, with the exception of some of the least reputable NFL reporters. If they did trade him, it would be bittersweet for me; sure, on one hand, my favorite team would have just traded the best thing to happen to them in decades. On the other hand, I’d have my Sundays wide open for the rest of my life.

That’s almost certainly not going to happen, though. Still, because it’s the NFL, the Bears are going through with the entire smokescreen process, which leads to Bears general manager Ryan Poles saying things like this on Tuesday, essentially trying to leave the door open to “maintain” trade leverage.

Bears head coach Matt Eberflus followed suit:

The whole thing is just so impossibly stupid. It’s a great example of how the sports content industry thrives on a bunch of made-up bullshit. Basically no one knows anything beyond the basic facts (the Bears want to move down from #1 overall) and none of it has any real immediacy or urgency. My life won’t be any different if the Bears trade the pick tomorrow or on the morning of the draft. It’s going to arrive and we’ll have the answer when it does.

But, god, is the whole thing tiring in the meantime. Just make it stop, please. Just get to the parts that matter and forget everything else.

About Jay Rigdon

Jay is a columnist at Awful Announcing. He is not a strong swimmer. He is probably talking to a dog in a silly voice at this very moment.

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