On September 28, 2026, a 38-year-old third-string quarterback who hadn’t started an NFL game in 1,009 days strolled into Soldier Field to face a 2-0 Philadelphia team that half the sporting press had already sized for Super Bowl rings and a parade route.
Case Keenum. QB3.
The guy you keep on the roster so your rookie franchise savior has a warm body to watch film with. Not the guy you expect jogging out for the coin toss on Monday Night Football with the whole country watching.
But Caleb Williams was out with a hamstring injury. Tyson Bagent spent most of the week marinating in concussion protocol, clearing it only the day before the game. So the job fell down the depth chart, past the starter, past the usual backup and landed in the lap of the third name on the list.
You know what he did with it?
He completed 24 of 34 passes for 247 yards, threw two touchdowns and then dove across the goal line himself on a fourth-quarter sneak.
He crushed it!
Final: Bears 27, Eagles 7. The unbeaten NFC darlings, handed their first loss of the year by a guy who could have been home mowing his lawn. Chicago Bears game recap.
And the part that’ll wreck you a little: his kids got to watch their dad play.
Afterward, his five-year-old daughter, Cadence, ended up on the SportsCenter set next to Scott Van Pelt. He asked whether she’d rather watch Bluey or her dad’s game the next morning.
She didn’t blink.
“The game.”
Amazing! Watch the postgame family moment.
Even if you are not a football fan, I promise there is a huge lesson here.
A Little Backstory
By that game, Keenum was in his 15th NFL season.
Eight teams. Sixty-plus starts.
He once dragged my 2017 Vikings to within a single game of the Super Bowl. Side note: the team that ended that Vikings run was Philadelphia. Revenge is a dish best served the better part of a decade cold. Keenum’s career history.
He’s also been cut, benched and eulogized by the football commentariat more times than he can count.
By 2024, he was on injured reserve in Houston, wondering if he’d ever take another NFL snap. By his own account, he was retired “in my own head” before Ben Johnson called and brought him to Chicago in 2025.
Part of the job was mentoring Williams and Bagent.
In Keenum’s own words:
“I had prepared to be ready, but there weren’t a lot of phone calls coming.” Keenum on the call that brought him to Chicago.
Now, the detail that makes this whole thing sing.
As the third-string quarterback, Keenum had limited practice reps. The starter hogs those. The backup gets the leftovers.
Number three leans heavily on mental reps: film, meetings and walking through the playbook in his skull like a man rehearsing a speech he may never give.
So how does a dude with limited first-team practice work, and no regular-season game action in nearly three years, face a Vic Fangio defense and carve it up like a Thanksgiving turkey?
He answered that himself years ago with the words he’s built an entire career on:
“You don’t have to get ready if you stay ready.”
He said it in 12 words better than I’ll manage in a thousand. Keenum on staying ready as a backup.
He Never Got Out of Striking Distance
That’s the point. Everything else is footnotes and jokes.
Keenum’s readiness did not begin the week of the Eagles game.
It couldn’t.
You cannot conjure years of preparation out of three days of practice, no matter how many pre-workouts you sacrifice to the gods.
What he could do, and what he’d quietly been doing while nobody was watching, was stay close.
Keep his body prepared. Take the available reps. Know the offense down to the footwork. Keep the playbook warm even when the phone sat dead silent on the counter.
Then, when the universe kicked the door in, he had a full week of preparation while the quarterbacks ahead of him dealt with injuries.
He didn’t have to go hunting for his game like a guy patting his pockets for lost keys. It was right there. He reached out and grabbed it. The Bears’ account of Keenum’s preparation.
Now point that lesson straight at your own training.
You can, and absolutely should, periodize.
Phases are good.
You cannot chase everything hard at once, and pretending you can is how people spin their wheels for years and stay simultaneously mediocre at all of it.
Push a hypertrophy block.
Chase a strength peak.
Build an aerobic base.
All correct answers, Brosefus.
But there is a canyon between backing off a quality and abandoning it in the desert. Grand Canyon. Mule ride. The whole postcard.
Let a modality drop all the way to zero for an extended period, and the road back can be long and immensely sucky.
Keeping some meaningful aerobic work in your program gives you less lost ground to recover later.
The lifter who hasn’t touched a hard interval since the Obama administration is starting from the parking lot, in the rain, with a flat tire.
And notice: Keenum stayed prepared without carrying a starter’s weekly workload.
Film and mental reps supported his physical preparation. They did not replace it.
Same principle for you. You don’t have to train every quality at full tilt to help preserve it. But the maintenance work still needs to deliver an appropriate stimulus.
Stay within striking distance of everything you care about being able to do.
That Age Thing
Thirty-eight is old for a quarterback. Nobody’s arguing.
Keenum became the oldest player in Bears history to score a rushing touchdown in that game, which tells you exactly where he sat on the actuarial table. Keenum’s Bears records.
But “he’s too old” is the lazy excuse people reach for when they don’t feel like examining the real variables.
Keenum didn’t forget how to read a Cover 2 on his 38th birthday.
Arm strength doesn’t detonate at a specific candle count.
Your body is not a carton of milk with a stamped expiration date.
Age-related changes are real. I’m not going to hand you a woo-woo “age is just a number” bumper sticker.
But your birth date alone does not tell you what you can do, what you can maintain or how your training should change.
Keep a Maintenance Dose in Your Training
Whatever phase you’re in, keep a maintenance touch on the qualities you’re not featuring.
Maintenance, not progress. You’re propping the door open, not chasing a PR.
Grinding through a hypertrophy or strength block with cardio shoved on the back burner?
Two aerobic sessions per week can be a useful starting point. Research suggests endurance can be maintained for a period with reduced frequency or volume, provided enough intensity is retained.
Chasing an aerobic goal instead, whether a race, HYROX or a VO₂ max push, while your lifting quietly falls off a cliff?
Try two challenging strength sets per exercise, twice a week, across the big patterns: a squat or hinge, a press and a pull.
That is a starting framework, not a complete program. Older adults may need two to three sets per exercise to maintain muscle size, and the relative load still matters. Review of the minimum exercise dose needed to maintain performance.
Enough work to remind your body what heavy feels like so it’s still home when you come knocking later.
The point is not that these exact numbers work for everyone. It’s that maintenance deserves a place in the plan.
Zero makes the road back harder. Too little stimulus can leave you losing ground, too.
Stay ready.
