Inside QB Tyson Bagent’s Improbable Journey From D-II — to CrossFit — to the Bears

When NFL scouts bothered to make the trek to Shepherdstown, West Virginia, a tiny college town on the banks of the Potomac River, their expectations were generally low. They’d be looking for the rare, overlooked, undersized player who might someday grow into an NFL body.

They weren’t generally looking for quarterbacks. Division II quarterbacks were much harder to sell.

“If you put your name on a Division II guy, if it doesn’t work out, it might be your job — especially when it comes to the quarterback position,” said Tyler Haines, who was the offensive coordinator at D-II Shepherd University in 2022. “There’s a ‘you better be right’ mentality, if you take a Division II guy. That’s a leap of faith.”

Still, the coaches at Shepherd tried to tell the NFL back in the early 2020s that their quarterback was worth that kind of leap. And by Tyson Bagent’s senior year, the message was being received. Scouts and executives were flocking to the small school, 75 miles west of Baltimore, to see him in action. Yet he was still snubbed, left completely undrafted in 2023, forced to fight his way onto the roster of the Chicago Bears.

In hindsight, maybe that’s just the way it needed to be for Bagent. And maybe no one should have been surprised that not only did he make the team, but seven weeks into his rookie season he became the first undrafted Division II quarterback since 1950 to start an NFL game. And maybe nobody should be surprised that last week, the Bears rewarded their valued backup with a life-changing, two-year, $10 million contract.

It’s just what the 25-year-old Bagent does when the world seems to doubt him.

“His back has been against the wall his entire life,” Haines said. “He’s been overlooked his whole life.

“And Tyson Bagent is not done.”

Years before he became the backup quarterback of the Bears — and his teary press conference last week announcing his new deal went viral — Bagent had a plan. He was going to “CrossFit my life away” and become the most jacked teacher in the history of Martinsburg (West Virginia) High School. It wasn’t an unreasonable goal. He was a small-town kid at heart. His father, Travis, a world-famous arm wrestling champion, even owned a CrossFit gym in town.

Sure, Bagent loved football and had quite an arm, too, but there didn’t seem to be a future for him in that — at least not at first.

“When you go to these camps you have to look a certain way as a quarterback, and he didn’t really fit the mold of what people were looking for,” said his Martinsburg High School coach, Dave Walker. “As a ninth grader, he was kind of an awkward little chubby-type kid. But he could really throw the ball.”

Yes he could. And Bagent was also “always the hardest worker in the room,” Walker said. That paid off with a spectacular high school career. As a three-year starter, he registered more than 7,800 passing yards and 112 touchdowns, and led his team to undefeated state championships in both his junior and senior seasons. As a senior, he was the West Virginia Player of the Year.

He had become a local legend and his state’s best athlete. Yet he heard virtually nothing from the two Power 5 football programs within roughly two hours of his home — West Virginia and Maryland. In fact, most FBS schools ignored him. His only offers were from two small FCS programs, Albany (N.Y.) and Robert Morris.

So he stayed home, went to his parents’ alma mater, to play for a coach he knew because they went to the same church. Any NFL dreams he had were surely dampened by the way the big-time college programs looked away.

But it didn’t take long for Ernie McCook, the head coach of the D-II Shepherd Rams, to see what the rest of the football world had missed.

“West Virginia and Maryland made a mistake not offering him coming out of high school,” McCook said. “I think there was a bias against the state of West Virginia, and they were probably questioning the level of competition maybe he played against. But I think he’s proven that we were the ones lucky to have him here at Shepherd. He didn’t belong down here at our level.”

Bagent threw for 518 yards and three touchdowns in his first game as a freshman. As a junior in 2021, he threw for 5,000 yards and 53 touchdowns over 15 games while leading his team to the Division II semifinals. He even won the Harlon Hill Trophy — the Division II Heisman. He had grown, too, into a chiseled, 6-foot-3, 215 pounds.

Suddenly, the two Power 5 schools that once snubbed him started calling. He entered the transfer portal and took visits to West Virginia and Maryland. He even considered Maryland’s offer.

But in the end, he told them both no.

“There’s a lot of things unique about Tyson — a lot of things other people wouldn’t do,” Haines said. “How many other senior quarterbacks with all those stats … he had done everything in Division II that he could. Why not go chase the Division I thing?

“Tyson’s just different. He wanted to see himself on Senior Day at Ram Stadium in front of his friends and family. Loyalty is huge with him. And he’s just different than other people.”

Calling Bagent “different” may be an understatement. Training with his father at the CrossFit gym turned him from that “awkward little chubby-type kid” into something of an athletic freak. Haines said he’s seen Bagent walk on his hands almost the entire length of the football field. That’s probably not surprising considering he once tried following in his father’s footsteps, arm-wrestling competitively as a young kid.

That “crazy CrossFit stuff,” as Haines called it, began when Bagent was just 10 years old and training at the feet of his father, whom he calls his “right-hand man.” But the habit stuck with him and he never stopped. He designed his own CrossFit programs in college. McCook told the story of how Bagent did post-practice workouts at the home of one of his former high school teachers, not far from the Shepherd practice field. He called them “natural” CrossFit workouts that included bench-pressing logs and running with weighted backpacks.

Bagent even made his own cold tub, carving out a small piece of the Potomac River, where he could bathe in the natural water and ice — or, when it got cold enough, just sit in the freezing cold water with teammates and friends.

None of that is typical behavior for a quarterback — at any level. But he wasn’t just a quirky novelty. He worked hard to learn the playbook, study film, and become a leader for his teammates. And it all paid off. By the time he left Shepherd in 2022, he held the NCAA career record with 159 touchdown passes and the Division II records for passing yards (17,034) and total touchdowns (171).

By then, the scouts were swarming Shepherdstown. Haines, who also served as Bagent’s NFL liaison, said he was dealing with scouts and executives “all day, every day.” They were there at every game and every practice. Some made nearly a dozen trips throughout his senior year.

“They were leaving there saying, ‘Wow, I can’t wait to go back and tell the office about this kid, that we might’ve found something.’” Haines said. “It was never, ‘OK, here’s my card, we’ll be in touch.’ It was, ‘Tell me more. Tell me more.'”

His performance also got the attention of then-Senior Bowl executive director Jim Nagy, who compared Bagent to Tony Romo, an FCS product (Eastern Illinois) prior to his distinguished 14-year career with the Dallas Cowboys. Nagy invited Bagent to the showcase — a rare honor for a Division II quarterback. And Bagent dazzled NFL observers all week long and was even better on game day, completing 17 of 22 passes for 138 yards and one interception.

His coach in that game was Luke Getsy, then the offensive coordinator of the Bears, who just happened to be the team that scouted him in person the most in Shepherdstown.

“The Bears scouts were relentless,” McCook recalled. “I’m sure someone was jumping on the table in that scouting department when Tyson was coming out.”

Fittingly, during the 2023 NFL Draft, the Bears snubbed Bagent, too. But they quickly learned the lesson that Walker, his high school coach, asserted everyone should learn about Bagent: “Never count him out.” 

He showed up at training camp that summer and beat out veteran P.J. Walker for a spot on the Bears’ roster, and then eventually jumped vet Nathan Peterman to become the No. 2 quarterback behind Justin Fields.

In Week 6 of that 2023 season, Fields injured his thumb and Bagent became the first undrafted rookie from a Division II school to start an NFL game in 73 years. In four-plus games, he completed 65.7% of his passes (94 of 143) for 859 yards, three touchdowns and six interceptions. He also ran 23 times for 109 yards and two touchdowns, as the Bears went 2-2 in his four starts.

It was far from perfect, but it was proof that the quarterback everybody kept overlooking definitely belonged in the league.

The Bears still think he belongs two years and one coaching change later, which is why they gave him the first multiyear extension they had given to any quarterback since 2014. 

It took just one offseason for him to win over his new head coach. 

“I’ve really been blown away by his approach from the spring to the start of camp to where we are now,” Ben Johnson said. “He does a tremendous job knowing what to do, how to do it and getting it done.”

McCook added: “Never underestimate the connection Tyson will have with the coach once they sit in the meeting room with him. When you’re a coach and have a guy that works really hard and is very focused and dedicated to learning the playbook and covering even the smallest details, coaches have a great appreciation for that guy. I think that’s the anomaly. That’s the guy that’s hard to find. I don’t care what level you’re at.”

Of course, that trust and even his ability can only go so far. Bagent enters this season as a backup to Caleb Williams, the No. 1 overall pick in the 2024 NFL Draft. Bagent appeared in just four games last season — twice to take a knee at the end of Bears wins — and threw only two passes (completing them both). With 14-year veteran Case Keenum currently on the Bears’ roster, there’s no guarantee that Bagent will be next up if Williams goes down.

It’s possible that his shining moment for this season might have already happened — this past Friday, when he played the entire second half of the Bears’ final preseason game and went 20 of 28 for 212 yards and three touchdowns, the last of which came with seven seconds left to secure a 29-27 win over the Chiefs. Or maybe it was that unforgettable press conference two days earlier, where he visibly cried while sharing that his father “didn’t even have running water until he was in high school” and seemed genuinely awed by the life-changing windfall he had just earned.

That’s his reality, that he’s still living his football life on the professional fringes, knowing a long NFL career is far from promised.

Then again, nothing has ever been promised to Bagent. 

“I’m sure there’s people still questioning him,” McCook said. “But what he’s doing on the field is not by accident. I’m telling you, it’s not a fluke. It’s real. And I think he’s going to have a tremendous career ahead of him.”

“He’ll be a household name in this league,” Haines promised, “because he has always found a way.”

Ralph Vacchiano is an NFL Reporter for FOX Sports. He spent six years covering the Giants and Jets for SNY TV in New York, and before that, 16 years covering the Giants and the NFL for the New York Daily News. Follow him on Twitter at @RalphVacchiano.

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