The Chicago Bears traded a compensatory fourth-round pick to Jacksonville for former Super Bowl MVP Nick Foles on Wednesday.
Bears offensive coordinator Bill Lazor coached Foles in Philadelphia, and Bears head coach Matt Nagy coached Foles in Kansas City. The 31-year-old will likely compete with Mitch Trubisky for the starting job in 2020.
Good move for the Bears?
“I felt like they had to give themselves another option,” RADIO.COM NFL insider Ross Tucker said on After Hours with Amy Lawrence. “I really did. I felt like the way Trubisky played last year, I didn’t think they could go into the season with only Trubisky. I think he still will have every opportunity to win the starting job, every opportunity to take this job, run with it, keep it and maybe have his career flourish from here. Who knows?”
Trubisky, 25, was the No. 2 overall pick in 2017 and has been up and down – mostly down – in his brief NFL career. With Foles in the fold, the pressure to remain the starter is very real.
Could that hurt Trubisky’s development?
“I’ve always felt like on some level, if that’s the case, if Trubisky doesn’t play as well because they’ve got Foles, then he’s probably not really the guy anyway,” Tucker said. “There are guys like Tom Brady, when Bledsoe was still there, they take the opportunity and they run with it. Even though there’s another guy there, the competition kind of sharpens them and allows them to perform their best, and there are guys that kind of falter under the bright lights of the competition of having someone else at their position. We’ll see which one Trubisky is. I felt like the Bears had to make a move.”