Nagy: Justin Fields picked up Day 1 lessons ‘fairly easily'

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Rookie minicamp is over, and the results appear to be unanimous: Justin Fields was pretty impressive in his first professional practices. On Sunday, Matt Nagy got to watch Fields at Halas Hall for the first time, albeit just in walk-throughs. But he still was able to get a sense of what Fields was able to accomplish on Friday and Saturday, watching through an iPad toted around the practice field by assistant coach Kyle Childress.

“With him specifically, what I noticed was the speed when we were in our team periods, the speed on tape didn’t look too fast,” Nagy said. “A lot of times, they can go, a quarterback can go to the wrong read a lot of times; the quarterback’s thinking about, ‘How do I take a snap, and get the snap and where do I step with the clock? At four o’clock or six o’clock before I fake the play-action? Where do I snap my head and not?’ All that stuff that we teach him, he did the first day fairly easily. In an easy way. That’s what we look for.

“Are you coming back and coming back to the coach every three plays asking him to repeat the play-call, because you forgot what the play-call was? Or is practice going pretty rhythmically because you’re going in and out on every play. He was. That’s a win.”

That said, Fields is far from a finished product in the team’s eyes. Despite the strong start, there’s still plenty for him to work at before OTAs begin next week. Andy Dalton is still the starter, and Dalton will take the first-team reps when veterans join the rookies at minicamp.

But Fields was never going to win the job in shorts, in the middle of May. This was always going to be the first step, in a series of steps, for Fields to eventually take over the starting job. When that will be exactly, we still don’t know.

“I think the easiest way for us to simply think about this is it’ll all happen for those quarterbacks,” Nagy said. “They’ll all play however they’re supposed to play. We’re all going to see whatever we’re supposed to see and then it’s our job as evaluators of who they are and what their strengths and weaknesses are to make sure that we’re doing everything we can to make the Bears the best team possible. That’s it.”

In the meantime, Nagy is happy with what he saw over the past three days.

“I was impressed with not just Justin but everybody — it was sharp. I thought it was really clean. And that doesn’t always happen.”

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