Greenberg: Enjoy Bears rookie QB Tyson Bagent's story of faith, defying odds while you can (2024)

LAKE FOREST, Ill. — Like a lot of young quarterbacks, Tyson Bagent dreamed of making the NFL.

And now that he’s made it, he can safely say it was fate.

“Yeah, oddly, I always thought it was gonna happen,” Bagent said Wednesday in his first midweek press conference as a starting quarterback in the NFL. “Me and my dad really were the only ones that thought that this was gonna happen.”

His father, for the uninitiated, is Travis Bagent, the arm-wrestling champion, so perhaps tenacity is an inherited gene.

A lot of things had to go right for Tyson Bagent to go from Martinsburg (W.Va.) High School to setting records at Division-II Shepherd University to Chicago, where the rookie will start for a charter franchise of the NFL against the Las Vegas Raiders on Sunday at Soldier Field.

The most recent fortuitous events that led to this moment are the Bears giving up on P.J. Walker in training camp, Nathan Peterman being not very good and Justin Fields hurting his thumb last week.

But you know what they say about luck, it’s preparation meeting opportunity. Bagent showed up to camp ready and he’s made the most of his chance. And if you’re a quarterback who makes the roster for historically needy teams like the Bears and Cleveland Browns, the odds are you’ll get an opportunity to play at some point.

“I think my life has been planned out for me ahead of time,” Bagent said. “I think everything that has happened and will happen was already set in stone to happen. And I think coming from where I come from, I’ve pretty much beat every odd that there was for me. So I’ve got nothing to lose. I’m going to go out there and fight with these guys to the death and try to stack up as many wins as we can until we get Justin back.”

Faith in a higher power is obviously a big part of Bagent’s life. Not so much for Bears fans, whose faith has been tested for decades. Neither praying to nor cursing God has seemed to work. Can’t-miss quarterbacks have missed.

As we debate the viability of Fields going forward, this is like a little hiatus.

For the dreamers and delusional escapists, Bagent could be the Bears’ Brock Purdy. It’s probably not going to be so, but hey, he hasn’t started a game yet. If I knew who he was five years ago, I wouldn’t have bet on him making it this far.

Special Bagent 0017 🫡 pic.twitter.com/uor1eHLXbR

— Chicago Bears (@ChicagoBears) October 15, 2023

When asked what his backup plan was if he never made the NFL, he said, “I was going to basically just CrossFit my life away, get as ripped and jacked as I possibly could and be a teacher at Martinsburg High School.”

After deciding it was possible for him to make the NFL, Bagent said, the next step “was just figuring out how I could outwork everybody that maybe had more things than I did, had better facilities and all that stuff. It was really just trying to get it out of the mud, putting a lot of work in the shadows and just so I’d be ready for this week.”

For every Justin Fields, the five-star, can’t-miss prospect prospering under a bright spotlight and heavy expectations, there’s a Tyson Bagent, working just as hard somewhere less noticeable. In life, as in quarterbacking, there are many paths to get to the same destination.

According to Pro Football Reference, Bagent will be the first person born in West Virginia to start at quarterback in the NFL since Joe Gilliam Jr., who started seven games for the Steelers in 1973-74. But Gilliam, who was born in Charleston while his father played at West Virginia State, grew up in Tennessee. Bagent is born and bred. (The Bears’ first-round pick, right tackle Darnell Wright, is also a West Virginia native.)

There haven’t been many other NFL quarterbacks from the state (not including those who went to WVU or Marshall), and most of the ones who have actually thrown a pass predate the term “quarterback.” Any Ed Matesic fans in the house? In 2021, ESPN did a package on which states NFL QBs come from by using high school as a sorting mechanism. West Virginia was one of seven that hadn’t produced a quarterback in the Super Bowl era.

As someone who grew up across the river from “wild, wonderful” West Virginia, became a man (via bar mitzvah) in Wheeling and actually went to Martinsburg almost every summer as a kid, I really respect this accomplishment.

In fact, let’s just enjoy this moment now because Sunday will likely represent a darker kind of story. The tale of the Bears quarterback is one of woe and disappointment, of crushed dreams and slumped shoulders. And in keeping with that theme, Bagent’s first foray into Bears quarterbacking didn’t go so hot. Yes, he led a touchdown drive that culminated with him running one in last week, but he also lost a fumble that was returned for a touchdown and threw a game-sealing interception with a chance to beat Minnesota. Can he improve? Absolutely, and I hope he comes out firing Sunday.

Being an NFL quarterback is every kid’s wish. Being a Bears quarterback is what happens when you make that wish on a cursed monkey’s paw.

It’s a moody time in Chicago, which is another way of saying it’s Bears season. They’re 1-5 and everyone is questioning whether or not Fields is the future, while also pondering why we go through this mishegas every fall. In a few years, Bagent could be nothing more than the answer to a trivia question or a name for an angry fan to use in a rant.

But I’ll look on the bright side and say this is a moment to appreciate in what’s looking like another lost season.

When asked what it’s like to be here, a rookie from Shepherd University about to start a game at quarterback for the Bears, Bagent was downright inspirational.

“It means everything,” he said. “After the last game of my college career, I was talking to a good buddy of mine. We were kind of talking about hey, no matter how good or bad this goes at the next level, there is a very big chance that maybe you make the team but you might never get to start a game ever again in your whole life. You may never get that QB1 role ever again. That’s just kind of how the apple falls from the tree sometimes.

“But to look where I’m at and to look how everything has kind of fallen into place, just nothing but extreme gratitude and just feeling super blessed to be able to be (in) that kind of motivational role to the younger people in my family, kind of be that person they can look up to and just really motivation for everybody that may be at a smaller level and all the people back home.”

There have been a lot of quarterbacks to start a game for the Chicago Bears. Some good, most bad. And after Sunday, Tyson Bagent’s name will forever be known as one of them. No matter what happens, that’s pretty cool.

(Top photo: Todd Rosenberg / Getty Images)

Jon Greenberg is a columnist for The Athletic based in Chicago. He was also the founding editor of The Athletic. Before that, he was a columnist for ESPN and the executive editor of Team Marketing Report. Follow Jon on Twitter @jon_greenberg