Chicago Bears: QB competition could be decided on Saturday

The Chicago Bears quarterback competition is coming to an end.

The Chicago Bears quarterback competition appears to be mercifully coming to an end. After months of debate, and a few weeks of tense exchanges between fans on Twitter, we are a little over two weeks away from the start of the NFL season.

In just 16 days, the Bears will be in Detroit to take on the Lions in the season opener. To this point, Nick Foles and Mitchell Trubisky have equally split practice repetitions as Matt Nagy and the coaching staff attempt to evaluate who will be under center for that game.

It has been a back and forth affair with each quarterback having held a slight edge at one point during the competition thus far. However, as the old adage goes, ‘when you have two quarterbacks you actually have none.’ The point being, so long as the Bears continue to split the reps between two quarterbacks, they will continue to make it that much more difficult for whoever the eventual starter is to be ready for Week 1.

Said another way, the Bears need to name their starter sooner rather than later so that whoever that quarterback is, he can prepare with the first team.

With that in mind, it appears the litmus test will be on Saturday and we could have a starter named shortly thereafter. With the Bears scheduled to have Friday and Sunday off, they will have just six practices left before entering “game week” when they install the gameplan for Sunday.

That means there are, in reality, six more opportunities for the staff to evaluate these two quarterbacks. However, Nagy has seen Mitch for nearly three years. So what he has seen in these past two weeks has either confirmed his opinion or changed it. There is very little he’s going to do in the next six practices to change that. The same can be said for Foles.

So if the two players are really that even in the race, then Saturday will likely offer the opportunity for a “tie-breaker.” That’s because the Bears will travel to Soldier Field for practice where they will likely have a scrimmage (or something like it) since all preseason games were canceled due to COVID-19.

It will be the last, and really the first, true test for each quarterback to play under something resembling game conditions. How will each respond when the pressure gets turned up a bit, and the hits are for real? The answers to those questions will likely determine who is QB1 come September 13th.