In the upcoming (or ongoing?) Bears' quarterback competition, Nick Foles doesn't have a head start. His counterpart, Mitchell Trubisky, has spent the last two years playing under Chicago coach Matt Nagy, while Foles has bounced along the east coast. But the Super Bowl LII MVP is not far behind the fourth-year signal-caller.
Traded from the Jacksonville Jaguars to the Windy City after just one season in North Florida, Foles is making himself at home quickly in Chicago's offense because it's one he knows rather well already. It's the same one that Foles learned in Kansas City in 2016 when Nagy was Andy Reid's offensive coordinator and the QB was getting back on his football feet.
According to Nagy, Foles is not having a hard time getting back into the swing of things four years later.
"It's like riding a bike," Nagy said in a video conference Friday, per the Chicago Sun-Times. "He's been through some different offenses, even from the last time we were together in Kansas City. But once you present somebody like Nick the playbook and they start looking at it, all of a sudden it just clicks.
"You start remembering it and you just start retraining your brain from what you knew in the past year or couple years. There's still terminology differences between all of us, but that doesn't take much. And Nick's a smart guy."
The COVID-19 pandemic has sidelined any on-field work that could be done during mandatory minicamp or organized team activities and therefore shelved to the back of minds the QB competition between Foles and Trubisky, whose fifth-year option was declined earlier this month.
But the two signal-callers and their teammates are still getting their mental reps in on Zoom calls with coaches. Nagy says neither Foles nor Trubisky are getting "first-team reps" on the interwebs.
"There's no competition going on right now over Zoom," he told reporters.
The real competition will begin if and when the Bears players and coaches return to their team facilities and the practice field. Until then, Foles and Trubisky are, in theory, neck and neck for the starting job come September, and we are all ears for any updates on their status.
"We all understand that this thing is gonna be what y'all talk about," Nagy said. "And that's fair. That's totally fair."
