Mitchell Trubisky Era Must Begin After Mike Glennon Experiment Fails Again
For a brief moment, the skies have opened in Chicago. With Mike Glennon’s cataclysmic performance against the Packers Thursday night, a quarterback change is surely coming. Mitchell Trubisky is going to see the field on October 9th on Monday night (against the Vikings) after the Bears’ bye week. There hasn’t been an official announcement yet, but you don’t have to be Tony Romo to predict the future on this one. Bears head coach John Fox certainly left a wide open door when asked about the possibility of a quarterback change, “we’re going to look at everything. After last night’s performance, Chicago will literally burn down (again) if Trubisky doesn’t play.
It’s no fun rooting for your team to lose. If you’re a fan of a team that has no chance of contending during a season, it’s usually because they are hopeless at quarterback. So there’s an impulse to root for tanking. It’s a rational choice, but man is it a slog. You spend seventeen long weeks gaming out draft pick scenarios, wait another four months for the actual draft, pray your team picks the right person, and then spend another four months until actual games waiting for that person to take the field to see if he’s any good.
As a Bears fan, I’ve been down this road many, many times. Since the iconic 1985 season, Bears fans have endured the likes of Mike Tomczak, Cade McNown, Henry Burris, Craig Krenzel, Rex Grossman, Kyle Orton, Todd Collins, Caleb Hanie and, of course, Jay Cutler tossing picks and/or check downs into perennially losing seasons. This past season was especially brutal, as most of Chicago was waiting for Cutler to fail one final time before he could unceremoniously be shown the door and the Bears could start anew.
Except it didn’t take a master evaluator to know Mike Glennon was never going to be a franchise quarterback, despite his $14.5 million salary.
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There were a lot of people clamoring for Trubisky to start on day one, but I don’t think things could have worked out any better. Glennon has set the bar so low with his four-game performance—combining the mobility of a tortoise on Ambien, the checkdown artistry of a young Georgia O’Keefe, and a league-leading eight turnovers—that Trubisky could literally vomit on the field and still come out smelling like the candle section at Anthropologie by comparison. That is exactly what you want for your rookie quarterback who played all of 13 games in college. Confidence in quarterbacking can be a self-fulfilling prophecy; you simply cannot play the game if you are afraid to fail. But now that Glennon has failed so spectacularly, Trubisky is perfectly positioned to take risks without anyone thinking of what a hypothetical alternative QB may look like. Because we’ve seen it in Glennon, and it’s terrible.
The only downside to Trubisky succeeding is that he may save the Bears’ dinosaur of a coach, John Fox, in doing so. But that’s a side effect I’m willing to accept. Because middling coaches come and go, but franchise QBs are forever. Because for an NFL fan, there is nothing more important or satisfying than seeing a franchise QB develop in front of your eyes. Well, at least that’s what I’ve heard.
