Bears Finally Nail the QB Room Setup – But It's a Year Too Late

It looks on the surface like the Bears have something right regarding the quarterback position even before they start next week's OTA practices.   

They signed a veteran quarterback in Case Keenum who can help Caleb Williams and their other young QBs instead of relying entirely on the coaching staff. Maybe they have someone who can help Williams watch film correctly now if the new coaches don't, although that seems unlikely after revelations of the past week. Williams will probably have two or three people attached to him every time he picks up an iPad to look at film. 

This is definitely the right approach when their quarterbacks coach, J.T. Barrett, may have played the position but was only Lions assistant QB coach and was working in Detroit with a staff that had a well-established veteran quarterback starting. It's his first year as the head QB coach.

Keenum's addition is the kind of move that only further underscores how big of a blunder last year's Bears coaching staff made.

It's already impacting players after their early phases of offseason work and probably will further when they start on-field OTAs.

"I mean, you talk about a guy, you know, especially somebody like me, you know, that is still really in search of how can I continue to get better, what a guy to be able to talk to about any different situation that you could possibly be in," backup QB Tyson Bagent said on Dave Kaplan's ReKap podcast. "Being a freaking guy from franchise, being the backup, being on the practice squad, I mean the dude ... longevity.

"My whole routine is different now, thanks to Case Keenum and him kind of offering his little tidbits on what he's done and then obviously me, you know, just trying to be a sponge and everybody else in the room I think just gravitates towards, you know, asking him a lot of the questions. So it's great."

The Bears had somewhat the right idea last year by having Brett Rypien at training camp, a bit of veteran, although he had started fewer games even than Bagent. But he had been around the league on a roster enough to know about things like the emphasis on watching film outside of regular meetings and could have been beneficial for Williams to have around. Bagent had one season of this.

But in their infinite wisdom, Matt Eberflus and staff decided to cut Rypien and he went to Minnesota after an extremely productive preseason. It left Bagent and another undrafted player in rookie Austin Reed, with Williams in the QB room along with former QB coach Kerry Joseph, who also was relatively inexperienced at what he did.

"This is why I like Case Keenum signing with them," tweeted former Bears QB Chase Daniel.

Keenum actually makes sense as a backup player, too, which should actually scare Bagent. After all, no one has said they need to keep three QBs on the regular roster and he still has only four starts to 66 for the 37-year-old Keenum.

However, the main contribution Keenum can make on a daily basis is what was described by Bagent in terms of helping teach a group of younger QBs.

It's an area where Eberflus' staff obviously failed last year but let's not ignore GM Ryan Poles' handy work in all of it.

If Poles has been part of the solution, it's a case of fixing a problem he had a hand in creating. Poles easily could have stepped in during the roster formation process and said they needed to keep Rypien for the purpose of having another veteran to guide the hot shot rookie QB, or he could have found another veteran prior to camp to bring in, someone with far more experience than Rypien.

Someone needed more foresight last year but they've at least shown there's more of it now at work.