Many fans look back on the 2018 season with admiration. It was the best year the Chicago Bears experienced in the past decade by a wide margin. They went 12-4, won the division, had the best defense in the NFL, and saw their young quarterback appear to take big strides as a starter. However, they say hindsight is 20/20. That hasn't stopped many players from that team looking back and wondering if it might've been better if the team had ended up having a losing season. It sounds crazy at first. Then you hear the reasoning.
Adam Jahns of CHGO has been following this story for a long time, and the details keep getting crazier. It centers around the relationship between Mitch Trubisky and head coach Matt Nagy. While things were cordial at first, it later came out that Nagy was never a big believer in the former #2 pick. That inevitably led to a fracturing of their relationship. Unfortunately, the quarterback's productive year in 2018 forced Nagy to keep him as the starter for at least another season.
Some wonder if that would've been the case had the Bears gone through a down year.
Quarterback Mitch Trubisky became a Pro Bowl alternate in his first season with coach Matt Nagy in 2018. Camp opened the following season with Trubisky in “Nagy 202” and with greater expectations. It felt like Super Bowl or bust.
“You have to be an extension of Nagy on the field,” backup quarterback Tyler Bray told me back then. “202 football is basically that.”
Some from that Bears team would later say that Trubisky was taking tests that he could never pass. The Bears went 8-8 in Nagy’s second season, and then in March 2020, the team traded for Nick Foles. Nagy was done with Trubisky. Of course, there’s a lot more to their story. But some close to those Bears teams will tell you that the success they experienced in 2018 turned out to be a curse in disguise.
The Chicago Bears might've pulled the trigger on a new QB a little earlier.
Eventually, they pivoted from Trubisky to Justin Fields in 2021. If Nagy had gotten the green light to move sooner, there is a reasonable chance the Chicago Bears would've been hunting for a new quarterback in the 2020 draft. That would've put them in play for names like Joe Burrow, Justin Herbert, Tua Tagovailoa, and Jalen Hurts. It is another great what-if in Bears history, serving as a reminder that instant success isn't always beneficial to the long-term outlook of an organization. There can be consequences. If nothing else, former GM Ryan Pace deserves the most scrutiny for hiring a head coach who was never really sold on Trubisky. It was a poison pill that set the disaster that followed into motion.
