NEWSLETTER
Mike Glennon is off to an inauspicious start with the Chicago Bears, and there isn’t anyone who hasn’t noticed.
Take Alex Marvez of the Sporting News, for example. Marvez ran down a list of the NFL’s biggest offseason transaction blunders and you’ll find Glennon’s signing with the Bears at the top. The three-year deal worth up to $45 million is essentially a one-year “prove it” deal, but a costly one that includes more than $16 million in guarantees, and has come with no return on investment through two weeks.
Unless you count pole position for the race toward a top draft pick, which we might be discussing sooner rather than later if Glennon’s troubles continue at this rate (or, gulp, accelerate in the games to come).
Still, calling the signing the biggest mistake of the offseason seems a bit much.
Knowing that Mitch Trubisky was their top offseason QB target all along, the Bears decided to roll the dice on the 5% chance for upside with a young back-up like Glennon (rather than stick with a placeholder like Brian Hoyer or Matt Barkley). If Glennon hits, cool, you’ve got a valuable piece. If not, well, no big deal – you guaranteed almost all of the money in year one, a year when you weren’t going to spend to the cap anyway, and did so in order to ensure you could walk away after that year and turn the keys over to Trubisky.
Did the Bears overpay for Glennon? In terms of the actual value he’ll likely provide the Bears, of course they did. But that was the dice roll, and it was one in which, although they had a very small chance of winning, they also had almost nothing to lose.
Glennon, to his credit, remains focus on the task at hand – winning his first game in a Bears uniform. Head coach John Fox confirmed on Sunday (and re-affirmed in his Monday meeting with the press) that Glennon would start the team’s Week 3 matchup against the Pittsburgh Steelers, so it’s not as if he should be worrying about job security because it seems as if he has plenty of it.
At this point, Glennon is just trying to keep it simple:
Glennon: "My goal every week is the same, it's to win and right now we're trying to get our first win and that's where my head is at."
— Chicago Bears (@ChicagoBears) September 20, 2017
And despite his struggles (particularly in the first halves of games), Glennon is still trying to have fun out there, responding to a reporter’s question regarding the offense’s dink-and-dunk passing style by saying: “Completing the ball is fun.”
Glennon has been accurate with his short and medium pass attempts, completing 67.1 percent of his throws. That number ranks as the 10th best among quarterbacks this season, but that means there are nine quarterbacks who are having even more fun than Glennon is right now. Among them might be former Bears quarterback Jay Cutler, who completed 72.7 percent of his passes in his Miami Dolphins debut. Cutler also threw for 230 yards and a touchdown en route to posting a 101.8 passer rating in a win.
Through two games, Glennon’s rating is 81.2, which ranks 21st among 33 quarterbacks. Now, that’s not much fun, is it?
Brett Taylor contributed to this post.
