Case Keenum, the career backup who beat the Eagles from memory

Case Keenum

Photo: Kevin B Long / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 17, 1988 Brownwood
Occupation	Footballer
Individual awards	NFC Offensive Player of the Month · Sammy Baugh Trophy · Conference USA Most Valuable Player

For most of his career, Case Keenum’s job has been to stay ready for a game that probably would not come. He learns the playbook, runs the scout team and helps someone younger get ready for Sunday. Then one Monday night in Chicago, with the starter hurt and the backup only just out of the concussion protocol, the game came. The opponent was an unbeaten Philadelphia Eagles team that had built its plan around a single idea: an old quarterback who had not played in years could be hurried into mistakes.

It did not work. Each time the Eagles sent extra rushers, Keenum already knew where the open receiver would be, and the Bears won comfortably. His head coach, Ben Johnson, explained it in one sentence afterwards: “He knows where everyone is supposed to be on every single play.” That is the whole argument for Keenum, and the reason the NFL has never quite decided what to do with him.

He learned the game at home. His father, Steve Keenum, a former offensive lineman, coached at small Texas colleges, among them McMurry University in Abilene, where he was known for aggressive passing offenses. Casey Austin Keenum was born on February 17, 1988, in Brownwood, Texas, and grew up in Abilene, where in 2004 he led Wylie High School to a state championship with a game-winning drive against Cuero. Only one school in the top tier of college football offered him a scholarship: the University of Houston.

Keenum redshirted behind Kevin Kolb, then threw for more than 5,000 yards in three separate seasons, something no other quarterback at that level has done. After a torn ACL wiped out his 2010 season, the NCAA granted him a sixth year, and he used it to pass Timmy Chang as the sport’s career leader in passing yards, finishing with 19,217 yards and 155 touchdown passes, both NCAA records. He won the Sammy Baugh Trophy twice, and Houston retired his No. 7.

None of it moved the NFL. Undrafted in 2012, he spent a year on the Houston Texans’ practice squad. He made eight starts in 2013, the first of them at Kansas City with a touchdown pass to DeAndre Hopkins, and the following year he was waived, claimed by the St. Louis Rams and then signed back by Houston. That sequence, a promising stretch followed by a closing door, became the shape of his career. The Rams traded a seventh-round pick for him in 2015 and, in Los Angeles in November 2016, benched him for the first overall pick, Jared Goff.

Minnesota signed him for one year in 2017 as Sam Bradford’s backup. Bradford got hurt, and Keenum played the season of his life: 3,547 yards, 22 touchdowns, seven interceptions and a 13-3 record. In the divisional round against New Orleans, with ten seconds left, he threw the pass that Stefon Diggs carried 61 yards for the winning touchdown, the play known ever since as the Minneapolis Miracle. A week later the Vikings lost the NFC Championship Game 38-7 in Philadelphia, to an Eagles team quarterbacked by Nick Foles, his close friend and former Rams teammate.

That season is also the source of the most persistent misreading of him. Denver paid him $36 million over two years, and his one season there was mixed at best: a career-high 3,890 yards, but 15 interceptions and a 6-10 record. Washington traded for him in 2019 and benched him for the rookie Dwayne Haskins four games into the season. The verdict that formed, that the 2017 Vikings were a strong roster carrying an ordinary quarterback, is not unfair. It is incomplete. Keenum has rarely been good enough to keep a starting job and has almost always been good enough to win when handed one at short notice. That is a narrower skill. For a team that loses its starter midseason, it is also the more valuable one.

The years that followed were spent mostly in the quarterback room. He backed up Baker Mayfield in Cleveland, spent a year in Buffalo with Diggs again and returned to Houston for a third stint, winning in overtime at Tennessee in place of the injured C.J. Stroud in December 2023. A Lisfranc injury to his foot cost him all of 2024. The Chicago Bears signed him in April 2025 on a one-year deal built around mentoring Caleb Williams, and he did not play a single snap that season. In March 2026 they signed him again, for two years and $5.5 million, still as the third-string quarterback.

Away from the field, Keenum and his wife, Kimberly, have two children. He talked about his Christian faith minutes after the Minneapolis Miracle, published Playing for More, a book written with Andrew Perloff, in 2018, and has been a part-owner of Haak Winery in Santa Fe, Texas, since 2020.

Williams strained a hamstring in the second week of the 2026 season and Tyson Bagent had been cleared from the concussion protocol too late to practice, so on September 28, at 38, Keenum started a regular-season game for the first time in 1,009 days. He completed 24 of 34 passes for 247 yards and two touchdowns without a turnover, ran for a third, and the Bears beat the previously unbeaten Eagles 27-7. Against the blitz he went 11 for 11. It made him a winning starter for a seventh franchise, tying Ryan Fitzpatrick’s NFL record. “Golly, this is special,” he said, after admitting he had thought more than once that he would never play again.

Chicago did not turn the season over to him. Johnson chose Bagent for the next game, against the New York Jets, but, irritated that the decision had leaked, sent Keenum out for the opening snap, a pitch to D’Andre Swift, before handing over. Johnson likened it to a ceremonial first pitch, and the 23-12 win went on Keenum’s record. A week later he came on in the fourth quarter of a 31-7 loss at Green Bay, threw an interception on fourth-and-goal and lost a fumble. Afterwards he said no one lasts long in the league without knowing how to get up after a beating, words aimed at Bagent as much as at himself.

Williams returned in the sixth week and has thrown for more than 300 yards in each of his two games back, and the Bears are 5-2. Keenum is back where the depth chart puts him, behind Williams and Bagent, signed through the 2027 season. The night against Philadelphia did not change what he is. It showed, for one game, what a decade of learning other teams’ playbooks is worth on the night someone finally needs it.

Tags: sports, athletes, NFL, American football players, Chicago Bears, Minnesota Vikings, Case Keenum

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