We were extremely high on the two elite dual-threat quarterbacks in the 2021 draft class: Trey Lance and Justin Fields. But due to one team being in win-now mode and the other team employing the incompetent Matt Nagy, neither were able to muster up real fantasy football significance during their freshman seasons. With the 49ers set to move on from Jimmy Garoppolo and the Bears finally moving on from Nagy, both quarterbacks will be given the chance to hit their fantasy ceiling in 2022 and beyond.
Matt Eberflus wasn’t the hot young offensive mind that fantasy owners wanted to pair with Fields, but new offensive coordinator Luke Getsy has the ideal offensive philosophy to take Fields back to his game-breaking college days — while also adding in new wrinkles to his professional arsenal.
“A MATCH MADE IN HEAVEN”
“This sounds corny,” former Mississippi State head coach and offensive mastermind Joe Moorhead said to The Athletic, “but it’s kind of a match made in heaven for Justin’s skill set.”
Like most young innovative offensive minds, Getsy rose quickly through the ranks. Getsy made a real name for himself as an offensive quality control coach and wide receiver coach for four seasons under Mike McCarthy in Green Bay before being hired by Moorhead to be his offensive coordinator and wide receiver coach at Mississippi State.
Moorhead is known as one of the better offensive-minded coaches in college football. While calling the offense at Penn State, Fields committed to the Nittany Lions, however, Fields decommitted when he found out Moorhead was going to take the Mississippi State job.
Because Getsy helped Moorhead run his scheme, one should expect Getsy’s offense to have a mix of the Pistol formation and RPO packages that should make life easier for Fields.
Moorhead found success at the FCS and FBS levels and broke records in the process. While at Fordham, Moorhead’s innovative offense averaged 39 points per game. Then, he took Penn State from 101st in scoring to 21st. In his second season, the Nittany Lions ranked seventh in the nation in scoring at 41.1 points per game under quarterback Trace McSorely and Saquon Barkley.
Although things did not work out as planned at Mississippi State, Moorhead and Getsy put together one of the SEC’s best rushing attacks with a below-average SEC offensive depth chart.
Following Moorhead’s firing (due to a cheating scandal and detrimental upsets), Getsy returned to Green Bay to become Matt LaFleur’s quarterbacks coach before adding the passing coordinator title to his name. According to The Athletic, Getsy focused on third downs for the Packers, but he also worked hand-in-hand with Aaron Rodgers. Moorhead saw familiar concepts but he also saw added wrinkles that went beyond his offensive system.
“Whether it’s some of the things you see with (Aaron) Rodgers, like inside-zone read and throwing something quick to the flat, or throwing some of the things down the field that are RPO-based and some of the same route structures that we’ve done, Luke is a smart, smart guy and he’s carried all of the great ideas and concepts that he’s learned over the years,” Moorhead articulated.
Moorhead said Getsy’s system will consist of an “RPO-based run game that takes advantage of a quarterback’s running skill set, combining that with a West Coast system that takes a ton of shots down the field.”
That system should work wonders for Fields’ skill-set.
Moorhead also compared Getsy to Joe Brady, who worked under him at Penn State.
“The way Luke was as a GA was really the same way that Joe Brady was at Penn State,” Moorhead said. “These were guys who you asked questions as if they were a full-time coach because you valued their input in that regard because you knew the information or the answers they provided were going to be ones that created value.”
Getsy has worked under tremendous offensive minds such as Moorhead, McCarthy, LaFleur, and new Broncos head coach Nathaniel Hackett, which should only make his offense in Chicago even more diverse.
THE FIT WITH FIELDS
Getsy knows what he has with Fields and as a life-long quarterbacks and receivers coach, he knows the offense needs to be centered around the young signal-caller.
“We’ve got to dive into what everybody does best, right?” Getsy said. “It starts with the quarterback. This is a quarterback-driven offense. The things the quarterback position does well, that’s gonna be the driver of who we are. And then we’re gonna marry that to what the other guys on the football field do well. That’s the purpose of the offensive coordinator, right? To dive into what the people do well, what they do best, and then build the offense around that.”
And while Getsy will feature Moorhead’s dynamic wrinkles, he arrived back to Green Bay just in time for LaFleur to implement his offensive scheme, which is a branch off the Shanahan coaching tree.
“That was the ease in the transition,” Getsy added. “The west coast style system, that’s QB driven, that remained the same. From the time that I got there, their emphasis has been around that position, building through the QB position.
“The biggest thing that attracted me to that opportunity to work with Matt was the teaching style and the emphasis to committing to the run game, letting the run game drive the play-pass game and then building everything around that. We’ll be a similar type of approach. We’ll let one thing drive the next.”
Getsy, who spoke to Fields during the NFL Draft process last season, immediately got into contact with the quarterback once he was named offensive coordinator.
“That process, super impressed with the man, the person; you can feel the determination, the will inside of him as he was communicating to me,” Getsy said. “He was super sharp with what they did at Ohio State. And then just again just the brief conversation that we were able to have together here the other day, the same exact thing just jumped back out at me again.
“So I’m looking forward to getting to know him deeper, obviously. But I’m very optimistic about the type of person that he is and I think the will and the desire that he wants to be a great leader, too. So I think it’s a really cool opportunity with a young guy who I think has a really good drive.”
Since that conversation, Fields posted on Instagram that he was getting “back to the basics.” That description may look irrelevant, but fundamentals are something that Moorhead said Getsy preaches on a daily basis.
“He had an incredible level of preparedness, of work ethic, of loyalty,” Moorhead noted. “He was working with receivers rather than quarterbacks, he was an expert of fundamentals and techniques. He quite frankly did a great job recruiting, too. All the things that have allowed Luke to have success at the NFL level, and why it’s made him a great choice for the OC position for Chicago, are the same reasons that I brought him on at Mississippi State.”
SUMMARY
While Getsy is not a household name to most NFL fans and fantasy owners, he has an elite coaching background and he should get the best out of Fields in year two. Mixing Moorhead’s college wrinkles with McCarthy and LaFleur’s professional wrinkles should cancel out Fields’ rookie season and help him develop into an elite NFL and fantasy quarterback.
Sandwiched between Nagy’s Musical Quarterbacks and a season-ending injury, Fields averaged 17.23 fantasy points per game in the five games he played between Weeks 8 and 15. The rookie also threw for 1,870 yards and seven touchdowns, while rushing for 420 yards and two touchdowns in 12 appearances last season.
Fields currently sits just outside fantasy QB1 territory at QB15 on The Wolf’s 2022 Fantasy Football Rankings & Big Board. If the Bears can add a bonafide WR1 alongside Darnell Mooney, David Montgomery, and Cole Kmet, he could take his game to another level.