Brad Biggs, time to move on from Mitch

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1. On a perfect night for a late December football along the lakefront, you can’t help but wonder if Mitch Trubisky made his final start at Soldier Field. It has to be, doesn’t it?
A terribly frustrating Bears season came full circle and the embarrassment that players referenced was only magnified by the spotlight of NBC’s “Sunday Night Football.” The stumbling Bears offense closed out the slate of 2019 home games just the way it started back on Sept. 5 when it was the same NBC crew in town for the opener against the Packers — scoring just three points. Talk about symmetry, very ugly symmetry.

What was broken then remains broken now and, no, it’s got nothing to do with missed snaps by starters in preseason. The Bears are one week away from having an offseason to devote to determining what went wrong and more importantly how to fix it. There won’t be any recency bias for general manager Ryan Pace, his trusted front office advisors and the coaching staff when it comes to evaluating the operation and thinking about what little uptick the team has had recently. Not after this lousy showing that comes a week after a bad game in Green Bay that, on the surface, maybe didn’t appear terrible because of the stat padding the Bears were able to do after falling behind 21-3 midway through the third quarter. There was no stat padding in this one. Mitch Trubisky didn’t reach triple-digits for passing yards until the fourth quarter.


It was another ugly showing and reality is the Bears haven’t made strides on offense this season. They’ve regressed. Trubisky has regressed. Coach Matt Nagy is in a slump with the offense.

With one week remaining, the Bears rank 30th in scoring. Only the Bengals (246 points) and Redskins (250) are worse than the Bears (256). The Bengals have earned the No. 1 pick in the 2020 draft for their futile efforts. They’re likely to draft LSU quarterback Joe Burrow. If the draft was based on current standings, the Redskins would own the No. 2 pick. The Bears? Well, they’re going to be picking somewhere near the middle of the second round. At least they have two picks in that round as they own the Raiders’ second-rounder.


Bears quarterback Mitch Trubisky before the game against the Chiefs on Dec. 22, 2019.
Bears quarterback Mitch Trubisky before the game against the Chiefs on Dec. 22, 2019. (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune)
Barring a dramatic offensive explosion at Minnesota to close out the season, the Bears will almost certainly finish in the bottom six in the NFL in scoring. They could wind up in the basement too if the effort against the Vikings resembles what they did against the Chiefs.

It will mark the sixth time in the last 20 years the Bears have been among the bottom six in the league in scoring — and the third time since Pace’s arrival in 2015 and second time with Trubisky as the primary starting quarterback.


Year: Points, Rank, Primary starting QB

2000: 216, 28th, Cade McNown
2002: 281, 27th, Jim Miller
2004: 231, 32nd, Chad Hutchinson/Craig Krenzel
2016: 279, 28th, Matt Barkley
2017: 264, 29th, Mitch Trubisky
2019: 256 (and counting), 30th, Trubisky
You know what the Bears did after the 2000 season? They dumped McNown, a former first-round pick, in a trade with the Dolphins and changed quarterbacks. After the 2002 season, the Bears released Miller, used a first-round pick on Rex Grossman and paired him with Kordell Stewart and Chris Chandler. Hutchinson and Krenzel were forced into action in 2004 after Grossman was injured and the team invested a draft pick in Kyle Orton the next year. Barkley had the most starts in 2016 only because Jay Cutler was injured and the team drafted Trubisky and signed Mike Glennon for the next season.

What do you do when you’re at or near the bottom of the NFL in scoring? You make changes and strongly consider a move at the quarterback position. I’ve been hesitant to think the Bears would pull the plug on Trubisky as the starter; there’s been so much invested in him and so much hope pinned to him. The trade for Khalil Mack prior to the 2018 season was made with the idea in mind that the Bears were ready to compete for a championship. There’s no better time to do that than when the starting quarterback is on a rookie contract. Controlled cost at the game’s most important position allows for investments elsewhere.

But it’s impossible to fully evaluate this season and say there’s been progress by Trubisky this season. When you think you’ve come up with a way to compliment his game, you almost always have to attach a caveat to it that winds up being the needle to pop the balloon.


That Trubisky was utterly outclassed by Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes in this loss doesn’t make it any worse. It was no surprise Mahomes was the superior performer, operating with a mastery of the pocket to create time, angles and throwing windows in order to do damage downfield. Trubisky barely looked downfield and threw it downfield less. He had one deep shot to Allen Robinson that was overthrown.


If the Bears don’t make replacing Trubisky the team’s No. 1 offseason priority, they’ve failed to have an honest evaluation of what’s happening at Halas Hall and they’ve done the rest of the NFC North a favor. No one knows what is going to be out there just yet, but this mess isn’t going to fix itself with Trubisky remaining as the starter in 2020. The Bears have been shut out in the first half of four games this season. That’s more than one out of every four. They’ve failed to score a first-half touchdown in 10 of their 15 games. So we’re not talking about a small sample size here.

Until the Bears acknowledge they have a problem at quarterback and begin searching for an upgrade, they’re really stuck. That’s the predicament they found themselves in with Cutler — and Pace shouldn’t be given a free pass for sticking with Cutler for two seasons, more or less biding time with a guy everyone knew couldn’t take the team where it wanted to go. It will be the No. 1 question of the offseason: Are the Bears ready to freely admit they’ve got a quarterback problem?"

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I didn't realize we traded McCown so quickly. I understand he was a locker room cancer, but at least there is precedent. 

[WindyCity]

They will not move on in 2020.

The best we can hope for is that everyone gets flushed in 2021.

 

Pace crippled this team by picking Trubisky.