If you only deal in the bottom-line number, it’s hard to fault Nick Foles and the Chicago Bears after their 20-19 victory over Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on Thursday Night Football.
Foles got his first win as a starter in Chicago just as he got the win (save) after he replaced Mitchell Trubisky against the Atlanta Falcons, with just the loss to the Indianapolis Colts in between. The Bears felt Trubisky had played his way to the bench, and Foles looked like an upgrade on paper that arguably should have been made before the 2020 NFL season even started.
Editor's note: All of PFF's grades and advanced stats from Thursday Night Football will be finalized and made available to ELITE subscribers within 24 hours of the final whistle.
The trouble is that Foles hasn’t played significantly, if any, better than Trubisky since he replaced him. They are stylistically very different quarterbacks, and Foles has far more of a “gunslinger” mentality, but he may not be functionally any better under center than Trubisky was.
Thanks to a series of ugly plays, Foles is likely to emerge from Thursday night's game with an average-at-best PFF grade. His overall PFF grade against Indianapolis in Week 4 was 65.7, and it was 62.9 in his Atlanta rescue job. But while those grades are better than the one Trubisky earned up to the point he was benched (56.6), they’re actually worse than his overall grade for the season when he was sat down (70.6).
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