Monday Morning Means: Here Comes The Son
Justin Fields endears himself as Chicago's best hope for the future
Youthful energy, ain’t nothing like it.
Imagine the freedom Justin Fields and his Chicago Bears teammates felt as the clock ticked down to zero Sunday afternoon at Soldier Field. With what’s left of a mini monsoon surrounding the winners of a surprise 19-10 victory over prohibitive NFC contender San Francisco, there was only one thing left to do — run and hit the turf and let the slick Bermuda grass slide them forward, the type of ride we’d all love to have had every hot day when we were eight years old.
Indeed the heat has been on for the Bears, throughout this entire off-season it seemed. While several other teams endured coaching changes and front-office overhauls, it seemed that the one happening in Chicago did the least to impress anyone.
Damn if Ryan Poles didn’t seem like a cool, calm and collected gift from Kansas City, the type of cultivated talent as a manager that Matt Nagy thought he was as a coach coming from there. Damn if Matt Eberflus wasn’t a widely respected assistant, defensive-minded and intent on bringing grit and effort back to the Bears franchise. It would seem that ‘Flus and Poles and their humble, hard-working mentalities were the opposite of what Fields needed. They weren’t flashy, they weren’t obsessed with offense and it showed in the mostly workmanlike additions they made to the Bears both in the draft and in free agency.
The cues from the Bears’ offseason reached Bristol and New York and Los Angeles and the jackals latched on to a line of thinking they knew would inflame one of the NFL’s most energetic and wide-spread fan bases, one that would ensure engagement for mindless arguments on social media and former players who were desperate to get their new podcasts off the ground in the most cynical ways possible.
The bait got chomped on, #Bearsnation played its role, but all the while so did the actual Bears, who confidently got through a 3-0 preseason learning more about itself and not suffering any debilitating injuries, though quite a few went down in camp. Fields himself looked locked in against Cleveland in his last action before Sunday and while he didn’t look as good against the Niners as he did then, his second half play-making ability took over a game that his offense started woefully in. A 19-0 run by the Bears ended the game, Fields scrambled for a couple first downs and even got the ball up field for 51 yards on one occasion, 22 on another, 18 on another — two of those passes got in the end zone and a peak of what the Bears and Chicago have so hoped for emerged.
In 30-plus years of watching Bears season openers this writer pretty much only remembers bright, sunny settings for these mid-September games, especially by Lake Michigan between the Roman columns, both prior to the spaceship landing within its confines and since. Sunday was a unique departure and it didn’t throw the kid off any, it didn’t throw the fans off either. Standing with a poncho on as sideways rain descends isn’t my idea of fun but a packed house had it, it was the kind of crowd showing the kind of devotion that has to have the Bears’ brass salivating while imagining how these people and around 20,000 more will pack their suburban palace of the future.
By then “Bear Weather” will be extinct, but this franchise may still be basking in the radiation first put on by No. 1 in Navy Blue, the kid who could close down one era of Bears football and make any transition into the next passable for all of us, no matter our prospective commute to Arlington Heights or our existential worry about the team of our youth losing more and more connection to the place where we were born.
We will look to Fields as we look at a loved one flourishing in front of our eyes, an ever-evolving mix of comfort and non-comfort, something that came from us, an exhibition of mettle not unlike those who matured in front of us prior and eventually reached the highest heights — Payton, Jordan, Konerko, Kane and Toews, Rizzo and Bryant, Parker most recently — yet is making himself anew into something that we have yet to classify.
“Can you believe this kid?,” we’ll say, “I guess he got it, right?”
Yeah, he better. It’s his world now.
And because he hasn’t given up on us (*cough* Domonique), he will engender our trust and that will be needed as he expands our way of thinking and expand our possibilities with each improvised open field run and delayed down field read upon where the ball is released to some point where neither our eyes or the network camera has reached yet.
But lets chill with the flowery stuff for now. As Seinfeld said, it’s all just rooting for laundry anyway. And once you get your jersey dirty you might as well get your money’s worth and take that slide and take the ride that goes with it.
Follow Kyle Means on Twitter (@meansmatters); Follow WARR Media (We Are Regal Radio) on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram