Last night, Bears quarterback Case Keenum played in a regular-season game for the first time in 1,009 days. He played well, and the Bears won.
The fact that the Bears had him on the roster proves the importance of having three quarterbacks who can be trusted to play, if necessary.
When the starter is injured, the team is one injury away from needing a QB3. That’s what happened to the Bears. With everyone trying to figure out the extent of Caleb Williams’s absence due to a hamstring injury, no one knew that Tyson Bagent (who nearly beat the Vikings in Week 2 after replacing Williams) was in the concussion protocol.
Enter Keenum. Bears coach Ben Johnson got to work on crafting a game plan based on Keenum’s skills and abilities. Without Keenum, the Bears would have likely rushed to get Bagent ready, once he was cleared to play. Bagent wouldn’t have been as ready as Keenum was.
It’s an important aspect of roster construction to have a third quarterback who’ll be able to step in effectively, if the first two are injured. Not just on game day, but in the important days preceding the game.
The teams that don’t are taking a calculated risk that could lead to that one extra loss that could result in narrowly missing the playoffs once the dust settles on the regular season.
For the Bears, the Week 3 win over the Eagles becomes the difference between 1-2 and 2-1 — and the head-to-head tiebreaker with Philadelphia could become critical to figuring out the playoff tree come Week 18.