Justin Fields Shows He's Got Arm On Up On Aaron Rogers As Leader

CHICAGO — Bears rookie Justin Fields has showed why he has an arm up on a quarterback well on his way to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

At 21, Fields said he doesn't want to be compared to Green Bay Packers star Aaron Rodgers.

Yet, we must. Rogers, the once clean-cut NFL poster boy turned long-haired freedom fighter, forced us to realize that there's a marked difference between the Bears's barely-out-of-college field general and a rival going through a late-career crisis.

Green Bay's quarterback showed off his selfishness streak for his refusal to admit to being a vaccine-mandate scofflaw until he contracted COVID-19 and, as he says, found himself “in the crosshairs of the woke mob."

During a podcast interview, Rogers quoted Martin Luther King Jr. "You have a moral obligation to object to unjust rules and rules that made no sense.” he said.

But that's not what the leader of the Green Bay Packers did. Rogers did not object to the NFL's coronavirus protocols that he considers nonsensical and unjust. He cowardly skirted the rules to avoid COVID-19 tests and mask-wearing requirements abided by other unvaccinated NFL players.

It wasn't until after testing positive for coronavirus, that Green Bay veteran quarterback suggested that he was some kind of coronavirus-era Civil Rights leader being persecuted for his protest.

The Bears rookie quarterback is a different kind of leader

When asked if he was vaccinated, Fields said, "Yeah." And that one word spoke volumes more than all of Rogers' smug podcast rants in his own defense.

To Field's teammates, coaches and the people who clean his dirty clothes, "Yeah" confirmed a commitment to protect their health and employment.

To our city, where fewer than 50 percent of Black people are fully vaccinated, the African-American rookie quarterback's "Yeah" was quiet confirmation of his leadership by example.

That's proof Fields is already a better leader than Rogers, in a way that doesn't show up in statistics.

If you're wondering if that's important? Yeah, it is.

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, wrote and produced the Peabody Award-winning series "Time: The Kalief Browder Story." He was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docuseries on CNN and a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary "16 Shots."

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