Bears bucking their QB history with Caleb.

For most of the offseason I have been skeptical of the CW hype.  Mostly because almost all of what was getting published was hype.  Not a reflection on the young man.  Just that if you want me to be suspicious of something, surround it with mindless cheerleaders who attempt to shout down anyone who disagrees.

I found some analysis on CW that was very recently published (yesterday afternoon) by someone I respect.  This is an analysis of CW's college career in what the author (Swifty from Swift Network Sports on YT) considers "clutch" situations.   He uses the criteria of 3rd down plays, 3rd quarter play, 4th quarter plays and red zone plays as his sample for what he classifies as a clutch play.  And his sample size is either all of one season or the entirety of CW's career.  By going with a 100% sample size, it eliminates and possible sampling bias (or as JABF puts it, cheery picking). 

Here is a link to the source YT video.  It is about 8 minutes long and is full of good stuff and I strongly recommend anyone to watch this video.  I took a couple of screen shots from the video to post here.  This covers what I found most meaningful.  The images are hidden inside the spoilers as they are pretty large, and I wanted to be careful with the overall size of this post.  But the conclusion that I see is that this kid is the real deal.  You don't end up having a college QBR >200 in the red zone, over a 3-year career, without having some skills.

The following are CW's stats for his 3rd down pass plays.



Here are his stats for all 3rd Qtr pass plays:




Here are all his 4th Qtr passing stats:




Here are the stats for all of CS's red zone pass plays:



And here is Swift's "Clutch Play" summary:

It's important to note that both Poles and Flus talked about how important "key situations" (red zone, 4th Q, 3rd down, etc) are to them in QB evaluations.  

And Fields was literally terrible at all of those in the time he was here.  IIRC, he was either dead last or 2nd to last in all those categories.

I would say that was a possibility if he knew he was getting the #1 pick, but there was no way for him to know that. 

But maybe he didn't care what pick he got. He had the general plan in mind no matter what. But I tend to think he was waiting to see how Fields would play. I mean if a guy plays like Brady or Mahommes, you deal with his cap and build around it. You don't try and reset the cap.