The Bears’ offense might have less talent than any team since the winless 2008 Lions, former Bears coordinator Mike Martz said Tuesday.
Writing about NFC North quarterbacks for the33rdteam.com, which counts former Bears consultant Bill Polian and former Bears head coach Marc Trestman among its contributors, Martz painted a doomsday scenario for Justin Fields.
“Fields is a guy that makes a lot of mistakes and is not particularly accurate at times,” he wrote. “He’s not a quick read-and-react guy, and he’s on a horrendous team.
“But I don’t know if I’ve seen an offense that bad in talent since the 0-16 Detroit Lions. They just don’t have anybody there.”
Martz was the offensive coordinator for the Lions from 2006-07 — leaving the year before the winless season — and served in the same role for the Bears in 2010-11.
“I’ve seen a lot of really good players go to bad teams, and then their career just never takes off,” he said. “And I think that’s what will happen with Fields. It’s going to take a long time for them to get talent there. He needs to be on a good football team behind really good players for a couple of years to learn how to play the position.
“And, when you put a guy behind a bad offensive line and you have no talent at wide receiver and you tell him to just go make big plays, he’s going to learn bad habits. You start doing stupid stuff just trying to survive.”
That’s the Bears’ worst nightmare — that they can’t find out what they have in Fields because of a below-average roster.
“I think he’s a talented guy as a passer,” Martz wrote. “But you don’t know how to evaluate him because he just doesn’t have anything around him.”
