LAKE FOREST, Ill. — For the past two-and-a-half weeks, the Bears have been waiting to see when their top quarterback would be able to return to the lineup after being sidelined with cracked ribs.
They finally got the answer they were hoping for on Wednesday morning.
During his Wednesday news conference at Halas Hall, head coach Matt Nagy said that Justin Fields has been medically cleared to return to play and will start against the Packers on Sunday night at Lambeau Field.
This comes after the rookie quarterback missed the last two games in full due to his rib injury, which forced him to be pulled from the Week 11 game against the Ravens at Soldier Field. Since then, Andy Dalton has been filling in for Fields, seeing action in a loss to the Baltimore, the Thanksgiving Day win over the Lions, and Sunday’s loss to the Cardinals at home.
Fields played in the first ten games of the regular season, doing so in eight of those as a starter, taking over at first after a knee injury to Dalton. Before the Bears’ Week 5 game against the Raiders, Nagy named the rookie the team’s No. 1 quarterback moving forward and has held that position ever since.
During his time out of the lineup, the head coach maintained that Fields would remain the team’s top QB whenever he’d return from the injury.
In the ten games, the quarterback completed 58.1 percent of his passes for 1,361 yards with four touchdowns compared to eight interceptions with a 69 quarterback rating.
