A Month Left and Nick Foles Throws First Bears Pass
Beyond all else, Chicago Bears coach Matt Nagy and his team are learning to roll with the punches.
The entire National Football League has become as flexible as a limbo dancer in these unprecedented days of COVID-19.
NFL training camps are normally run lock clockwork, like in the military. They've learned because of pandemic precautions to expect rapid change in routine on a daily if not hourly basis. For instance, he had to move his scheduled conference call with media up a full hour on Wednesday.
"Well, let me just say this, this schedule can be at times a little bit consuming because you want to get it right," Nagy said Wednesday during a conference call with Chicago media. "What they give you, you want to be able to use as much as you can and make it make sense.
"There are transition times involved. You want to please everybody, whether it's the coaches, the players, walking back and forth across the practice fields from the Walter Payton Center back to Halas."
League COVID-19 rules have dictated how long specific parts of practice can be, when they can try to practice and what they can do. Pads come on Monday and most restrictions are gone, but no scheduling produced a more stark moment of reality than the fact Thursday marks one month until the start of the regular season and on Wednesday quarterback Nick Foles threw a pass to a Bears receiver running a pass route for the very first time.
There were no defenders, just receivers running routes and catching passes.
The NFL calls this "ramping up" toward complete practices next week but for a team with a quarterback competition it doesn't leave much time for competing.
"The players gotta understand that, there's a little bit more a sense of urgency," Nagy said. "So every single rep that you take in practice, every single rep that you script as a coach, it really, really, really has to be magnified.
"And when we're done with practice, we get together, we watch the film, the evaluation process, we have a good process for that. But there's definitely a sense of urgency between all of us and making sure were effective in every practice."
Faced with the reality they have one month to get Foles ready, Nagy couldn't complain about Foles' arm or that of Mitchell Trubisky's.
"You know, the timing that I saw between both those quarterbacks, Nick and Mitch, looked good," Nagy said. "There's going to be some times when there's going to be mistakes, and they're working through what we want to do here in this offense and trying to be perfect with that.
"Specifically with Nick today, I thought his feet were good. I thought his timing was good. But again, we're evaluating and watching these guys at the same time, and I thought that Mitch, too."
At least the teaching part seems to have gone well.
"They're helping each other out," Nagy said. "I told you all that it's going to be a healthy competition and so far they're proving me right."
Nagy has no time line attached to the quarterback battle.
"That for us is going to be fluid," Nagy said.
Of course.
"And when I say that, we’ve got to be able to see, OK, if we need to sneak more competitive periods in because we feel like we're not getting enough, where things are gray," he said. "We'll do that.
"As far as the timeline for that, we'll get together offensively as coaches and we’ll talk through everything, and we'll decide what we think is best in regard to communication to the quarterbacks and then communication as to how we want to handle it with our team."
Twitter: BearDigest@BearsOnMaven
