5 Justin Fields over/unders for Chicago Bears in 2022

As we get ready to see Justin Fields in his second NFL season we can look into whether he will outperform, or underperform expectations. Mike Clay of ESPN does fantasy projections for every team and is one of the more respected projection analysts in the industry. Looking at his projections for the Chicago Bears we can see if he is on base for players such as Justin Fields.

Will he do better or worse than the numbers that ESPN expects?

5. Over or Under 63% completion rate in year 2 with Chicago Bears?

As much as everyone wants to call ESPN the Chicago Bears haters, Justin Fields had a 58.9% completion rate last season, and now ESPN is projection a jump of 4.3% up to 63.2%. So, will he hit that jump?

This offseason we noted that Justin Fields ranked 33rd out of 88 of the most recently qualified quarterbacks in completion rate. It put him right near names such as Cam Newton, Blake Bortles, Mitch Trubisky, Jameis Winston, and Ryan Tannehill. What is interesting to note is that four of the five either did not go up or increased 2% or lower from one year to the next. None of those four jumped from the 58-60 range up above 63%, though. Only Mitch Trubisky did, he jumped from 59.4% to 66%.

In the case of Newton, he actually went down in completion rate. Some similar names to Fields also include Donovan McNabb and Josh Allen. McNabb improved by 9% from year one to two, and Allen jumped up 6%. However, neither jumped above 60% in their second season, it was just a factor of how low they were in completion rate.

History is great, and while we are going to use it to go under on his jump to 63.2%, it is exactly because of the fact that Tannehill, Winston, Allen, McNabb, Newton, and Bortles all went under in year two.

It is because now Fields is in a new offense, he only has one wide receiver he worked with last season returning, and he has always been a player who turns down the quick completion for the chance to take a shot down the field. That is always going to impact his completion rate, and that is why big arms such as Newton, and Winston did not shoot up in this area from year one to two.

Fields should be right in that 60% completion rate range, and 63.2% would be great, but for the first projection that ESPN gives, we are going to suggest that Fields finishes under.

Under 63%