NFL MVP Betting: Is Justin Fields' Ceiling High Enough to Merit a Dart?

When you think about potential MVP candidates heading into any given season, you probably don’t start with quarterbacks who led their teams to 3-12 records in the previous year.

But Justin Fields isn’t your typical 3-12 quarterback.

The NFL MVP odds at FanDuel Sportsbook have Fields listed at +2000 to take home the MVP award in 2023. That ranks 11th among all eligible players, and none of the 10 players with better odds finished with fewer than eight wins during the 2022 season. Fields will have to take a significant leap as an NFL quarterback to put together a legitimate bid for the MVP this season, and there’s reason to believe he might.

The Bumbling Bears

The Chicago Bears have been an absolute mess over the past two seasons. Their once-staunch defense has faded away since their elite 2018 campaign, allowing more points (463) than any other team in the league in 2022.

Their offense hasn’t been much better, either. The team hasn’t ranked better than 22nd in the league in points scored in any of the past four seasons. Even with Fields under center, they’ve yet to put it all together.

But that could change in 2023.

No team finished the 2022 season with fewer passing yards than the Chicago Bears – and it’s perfectly fair to argue that they entered the year with the weakest receiving corps in the entire league. Behind former fifth-round pick Darnell Mooney (who was only able to play in 12 games before suffering a season-ending injury), the Bears entered the 2022 season with Byron Pringle, Equanimeous St. Brown, and Dante Pettis as their top wide receivers.

Just glancing at those names, it’s no wonder two of the team’s top three pass-catchers by the end of the season were a tight end and a running back. Tight end Cole Kmet led the team with 50 catches for 544 yards and 7 touchdowns while running back David Montgomery’s 34 catches for 316 yards and 1 touchdown ranked third on the team behind Mooney.

To the team’s credit, they did try to address that issue at the trade deadline, adding Chase Claypool from the Pittsburgh Steelers to the mix via trade. The move didn’t exactly work out for them last year; Claypool caught just 14 balls for 140 yards over 7 games, but he will be returning for the upcoming season and will look to become a bigger contributor to the offense in his second season with the team.

More importantly, the team acquired wide receiver D.J. Moore from the Carolina Panthers in their deal to move out of the first overall pick in the draft. In addition to Moore, who has caught 1,100 or more yards in 3 of his 5 NFL seasons, the team used their 2023 draft to bolster their offensive line with offensive tackle Darnell Wright, and added more depth to their receiver group with former Cincinnati Bearcats receiver Tyler Scott.

We saw just how important having a competent group of wide receivers can be for a young quarterback with the Jacksonville Jaguars last season. Trevor Lawrence looked abysmal in his rookie season while throwing to a weak group of wideouts, but took a massive leap forward as a passer in his second season after the team added multiple receivers to their depth chart in free agency.

Upgrading from Byron Pringle, Equanimeous St. Brown, and Dante Pettis – castoffs and practice squad players from other NFL rosters – to legitimate receivers like D.J. Moore and Chase Claypool will pay massive dividends for Fields’ passing production in 2023.

Big Play Machine

Anyone who watched Fields play last year knows just how unique a player he is. His 1,143 rushing yards ranked 7th across the entire league – including running backs – despite missing 2 games. He was a record-setting machine in 2022.

With 178 rushing yards against the Miami Dolphins in Week 9 Fields set the single-game quarterback rushing yards record, breaking Michael Vick’s previous record of 173. His 555 rushing yards between Weeks 6 and 10 became the most a quarterback has ever had in a 5-game stretch. And according to the NFL’s Next Gen Stats, Fields holds the record for most rushes of 20 or more miles per hour in a single season across any position.

Fields is a rare, rare player. He’d be huge for a running back at 6’3” and 228 pounds, blazing a 4.46-second 40-yard dash at his Pro Day leading up to the 2021 NFL Draft. There just simply aren’t many players as big and as fast as Fields – and he plays quarterback on top of being one of the most exciting rushers in the league.

It’s possible we haven’t even seen Fields’ true ceiling as a rusher yet. The Bears were shockingly conservative when it came to utilizing his rushing capabilities as a rookie, and he finished his debut campaign with 420 rushing yards over his 12 games. Ohio State never made full use of Fields’ athleticism, either, relying on his cannon of an arm to hit future first-round pick wide receivers like Chris Olave, Garrett Wilson, Jaxon Smith-Njigba, and Jameson Williams in their prolific passing attack.

Offensive coordinator Luke Getsy opened up the Bears’ playbook in 2022 to allow for more designed rushes right out of the gate, and Fields warmed up to that style quickly. While he finished the first 2 weeks of the season with 48 total rushing yards, he had just 1 single game over the rest of the season with fewer than 47 rushing yards. Assuming he picks up where he left off as a rusher in the 2022 season, it’s well within expectations that Fields will break Lamar Jackson’s single-season rushing record (1,206 yards) for quarterbacks this year.

MVP Outline

Speaking of Lamar Jackson’s rushing record, the Baltimore Ravens quarterback set that record during his own MVP campaign. The Ravens went 14-2 that season, and Jackson finished 7th in the league in rushing yards while leading the league in passing touchdowns (36). He managed that feat while throwing for an average of just 208.5 yards per game, the 28th-most in the league.

How exactly did Jackson lead the league in passing touchdowns while barely throwing for the 28th-most yards in the league? With his unreal 9% touchdown rate. Jackson didn’t need to throw the ball often that season, but when he did it often ended up in the end zone.

Jackson’s dominance as a rusher that season forced opposing defenses into a bind. When they committed to stopping the Ravens’ dynamic rushing attack – which included Mark Ingram and Gus Edwards each averaging over 5.0 yards per carry – Jackson could hit them over the top for touchdowns at an extremely efficient clip.

Jackson wasn’t the first to leverage that exact play style into an MVP campaign. Cam Newton led his Carolina Panthers to a 15-1 record in his 2015 MVP season and led the league with his 7.1% touchdown rate. Newton wasn’t quite the same kind of rusher as Jackson or Fields, but he still led all quarterbacks that year with 636 rushing yards. More importantly for MVP purposes, he bolstered his elite 7.1% passing touchdown rate with an additional 10 touchdowns as a rusher – tied for the second-most in the league that year.

We obviously didn’t see Fields hit a 9% touchdown rate last season – only Aaron Rodgers in his 2020 MVP campaign has reached that mark since – but we did see Fields take a similar approach to Jackson and Newton on offense. After a disappointing rookie season in which he threw touchdowns at a paltry 2.6% rate, Fields’ touchdown rate spiked to 5.3% in his sophomore season. That mark ranked 6th-best in the NFL but resulted in just 17 total passing touchdowns due to the Bears’ league-worst 377 pass attempts.

Fields might even be in his own tier as a rushing quarterback, eclipsing the heights of both Jackson and Newton. Jackson has been an electric playmaker as a rusher but has specialized more in picking up first downs and scrambling than in punching in touchdowns on the goal line. Newton was a powerful runner in his own right but was far more effective as a goal-line hammer than Jackson given his 6’5”, 245-lbs frame. He’s arguably faster than Jackson in the open field and offers plenty of size to make him an appealing option at the goal line. The rushing touchdowns he notched last year were more than Jackson has ever recorded in a season

Fields threw touchdown passes at an efficient clip while adding elite value to his offense as a rusher in 2022. By following in the footsteps of similar quarterbacks like Jackson and Newton, he might be much closer to MVP-ready than people may realize.

Year 3 Leap

Fields already took a big step forward in his second season in the league. While his season-end numbers were suppressed by the Bears’ low play volume, he more than doubled his rookie-season touchdown rate while improving his interception rate and completion percentage. At just 24 years of age, he should continue to develop in his third season in the league and will benefit from playing in his second year of Luke Getsy’s system. Plus, his own growth as a passer should be even further supported by the team’s now-respectable receiver corps.

Even with Fields’ growth in his second year, the Bears' offense was not a successful one in 2022. They scored on 34.3% of their offensive drives (12th-worst) while averaging 5.6 plays per drive (5th-worst). Reading between the lines, that basically describes how the Bears’ offense operated on a “big-play-or-bust” basis. They couldn’t sustain drives, so they didn’t score unless someone – usually Fields – made a big play.

The additions the team made in the receiver group and on the offensive line should help them start putting together longer drives. Better receivers will give Fields more available targets in the passing game to help the team move the sticks, and having a more reliable passing game should open up better running lanes for Fields on the ground as well. But, there is one area Fields will need to take a significant leap for this all to come together in 2023.

Fields seriously needs to curb the number of sacks he takes.

In 2022, Fields took sacks on an astronomical 14.7% of his dropbacks. Only one other quarterback in the league (Russell Wilson) even took sacks at a double-digit rate. It is close to impossible to enjoy a successful offense when a quarterback is taking that many sacks.

According to a Washington Post article from 2017, only 1 in 6 offensive drives that yield a sack earn another set of downs following that sack while each sack on average is estimated to save a defense 1.75 points off the scoreboard. Roughly extrapolating from those averages, Fields’ 55 sacks cost the Bears 96.25 points of offense in 2022. Those 96.25 points could have brought the Bears’ total points on the season up from 326 (23rd-best) all the way to 422, which would have ranked 8th in the league. Obviously, no team can completely eliminate sacks from the game, but this does help illustrate just how much Fields’ sacks took away from the Bears’ offense.

His 14.7% sack rate was worse than the previous year’s 11.8% mark, and high sack totals were a concern for Fields during the pre-draft process. He took 52 sacks over his 22 games as Ohio State’s starting quarterback in his collegiate career. His sack rates didn’t look great in college, and they've taken a significantly worse turn now that he is facing NFL-level talent on a weekly basis. More than any other aspect of his game, he needs to stop inviting pressure and taking so many sacks.

Fields’ 3.12-second average time-to-throw metric ranked fourth-longest in the league in 2022, behind only Deshaun Watson, Sam Darnold, and Zach Wilson. He can start improving his sack rate by getting rid of the ball – or taking off on a scramble – quicker than he did last season.

The improved pass-catching talent around him should help him with that. Having receivers that can generate separation is a huge help to quarterbacks, and it looks like that might be especially relevant to Fields. According to Next Gen Stats, Fields’ 9.1% aggressive-throw rate – the percentage of pass attempts that targeted receivers in “tight” coverage – ranked dead last in the league. That makes a bit more sense when considering that his primary boundary receivers – Equanimeous St. Brown and Dante Pettis – went a combined 4-for-16 conversion rate on contested catches.

That statistic does describe Fields’ relative unwillingness to target receivers in close coverage, but it also describes how inconsistently the Bears’ receivers actually managed to get open. Of the team’s top pass-catchers, only Kmet and Mooney were able to generate more than a yard of separation on average from their nearest defenders. And, given their average of 5.7 and 6.5 yards of cushion at the line of scrimmage, it seems fair to say that those players created a lot of their “separation” just by virtue of running routes out of the slot.

Fields will retain Kmet and Mooney’s services this upcoming season, but he will also have Claypool and Moore to rely on outside of the slot – a massive upgrade over St. Brown and Pettis. Having more reliable receivers should help him get the ball out quicker and help him spend less time facing oncoming pressure.

Jackson and Newton took sacks at 5.4% and 6.3% rates, respectively, in their MVP campaigns. Those rates were far from elite but still miles better than Fields’ 14.7% rate in 2022. If he can get his sacks under control, the sky will be the limit for Fields in 2023.

Fields' 2023 Outlook

The 2022 Bears were close to a disaster, and Fields’ exciting playmaking came in spite of his surroundings instead of because of them. With a more respectable group of players decorating the team’s depth chart, he should be poised to make a massive leap forward in 2023.

We’ve already seen him fill up highlight reels with his special playmaking abilities. The single-season rushing record is within reach for Fields this year, and with a competent group around him, he could leverage his star-level rushing ability and flashy passing into an MVP bid.

The above author is a FanDuel employee and is not eligible to compete in public daily fantasy contests or place sports betting wagers on FanDuel. The advice provided by the author does not necessarily represent the views of FanDuel. Taking the author’s advice will not guarantee a successful outcome. You should use your own judgment when participating in daily fantasy contests or placing sports wagers.