Published Oct. 2, 2020 on Bleacher Report
The end of the Chicago Bears' up-and-down-and-up-and-down Mitchell Trubisky era somehow arrived sooner and later than expected. After just 10 quarters of football this season and a head-scratching 2-0 start, head coach Matt Nagy yanked Trubisky this past Sunday following an interception in Atlanta. In the moment, the move felt premature, but with the context of three-plus seasons—44 starts marked by frustrating inconsistency—the move also felt absurdly late.
One source who previously worked with the Bears during Trubisky's time doubts that he will ever be the franchise quarterback that his No. 2-pick status would suggest. His inexperience in big games in college didn’t prepare him well for the NFL, and his biggest weakness is difficult to coach: “It revolves around confidence, but really it is the mental part of the game,” the source says. “That’s ... where the other two were ahead of him in the process. The situation he is in being compared to the other two, it kind of compounded his issues. He got dealt a bad hand.”
The other two being quarterbacks drafted after Trubisky in 2017: Patrick Mahomes and Deshaun Watson, who are among the top faces in the league. Trubisky has never lived up to the expectations put upon a No. 2 overall pick, and his reputation suffers in their shadows. This offseason, while the Bears passed on extending Trubisky and traded for the QB who replaced him Sunday, both Mahomes and Watson signed mammoth extensions as their team's long-term answers.
More than three years after that 2017 draft, a maddening question haunts the franchise and will linger as long as those Mahomes and Watson shadows loom: How, why, and what on Earth was GM Ryan Pace thinking in selecting Trubisky?