The Kansas City Chiefs got Justin Fields on the cheap to back up Patrick Mahomes, but Reid thinks he can fix Fields.
Kansas City Chiefs coach Andy Reid knows that one of his offseason duties is talking up problematic players, and he continued his efforts to make his new backup quarterback, Justin Fields, sound like a real NFL quarter back in a piece written by Myles Simmons of Pro Football Talk.
“I like his game,” Reid said at the annual league meeting on Tuesday. “He can do the drop back game, he can do the movement stuff, play-action — whether it’s a naked or a sprint-out game. He has that whole package that he can do. He understands the screen game, understands how to set it up."
That whole package has mostly been MIA in Fields’ previous three stops, but one of the essential characteristics of coaches like Reid is that they think they can fix nearly any broken player, regardless of that player’s past struggles.
What Reid does have to work with is Fields’ athleticism, which has made him one of the best running quarterbacks in the game. Setting up an offense around that isn’t a formula for sustainable success, but it does constitute something of a foundation.
“He obviously — he’s going to be one of the better athletes on the field when he’s out there,” Reid added. "He’s fast, big, likes to play the game. So, I mean, all the stuff I like.”
Reid likes it for now, but whether he still feels the love when training camp starts is a different question entirely. One of Fields’ biggest issues is making poor decisions that lead to ball security issues, which is one of the big reasons why it may be more practical to institute a package of plays for Fields, although that’s tbd at the moment.
“We’ll see how that goes. I’ll talk with him and see where he’s at with that,” Reid said. “But he’s more than a gadget guy, that’s not how I’m looking at it. That’s not why we brought him in. We brought him in to play quarterback if he’s needed to play quarterback.”
If the complete quarterback concept gets as shaky as it has in the past, there’s always the running game. The stats make the idea impossible to ignore, as Fields rushed for 1,143 yards with eight touchdowns back in 2022, leading the league at 7.1 yards per carry according to Simmons.
Then there are his stats with the New York Jets last year, which are very different. Fields started nine games and “led” the Jets to a 2-7 record, as he completed 62.7 percent of his passes for 1,1259 yards with seven touchdowns and one interception. Fields also had 71 carries for 383 yards with four TDs, which works out to 5.4 yards per carry.
That doesn’t sound too awful until you see it on the field, then look at the box score and see games where the passing yardage total is under 100.. Fields’ drop-back game still has a long way to go, and Reid seems to have a pretty good idea of what he’s up against in trying to get his new backup to play a complete game.
“Wwhatever goes from there,” Reid said of his plans to round out Field’s game, and it sounds like he's going into this with his sense of humor intact. “If he gets bored, we’ll have a couple of things for him.”