Listening to Matt Nagy now, I’m convinced more than ever that John Fox never had a prayer of making it beyond 2017 as head coach of the Chicago Bears. Not unless he made the playoffs and everybody knows that wasn’t happening. Did Ryan Pace sabotage him with such an atrocious free agent class that included Mike Glennon and Markus Wheaton? That’s something for conspiracy theorists to discuss.
What is clearer than ever is Pace likely knew he was taking a quarterback last year and likely planned to find him a new coach once he got the green light from ownership to dump Fox. Yes, that’s entirely speculative without proof. Yet all the signs point in that direction. Pace saw the pinnacle of success in this method with Drew Brees and Sean Payton. He’s watched Mike McCarthy and Aaron Rodgers do it Green Bay the past few years too.
It would make total sense he’d want the same thing for Mitch Trubisky. That’s why he went out and found Nagy. Now the new head coach had a chance to talk about his young quarterback, from his offensive plans for him to what he wants to see. Hearing his words, it’s clearer than ever that Fox would likely have ruined the young QB.
Matt Nagy thinks like a QB, Fox grew up hating them
Fox came up the NFL ranks as a defensive coach. That alone questioned his qualifications for developing Trubisky. Never mind he’d never successfully turned any of his prior drafted QBs into viable starters. One merely has to see how the offense operated in 2017 to understand.
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The ridiculously conservative style. The lack of any creativity. A clear message sent to Mitch that he should avoid turning it over at all costs. It may sound like Fox was trying to avoid bad plays, but it was also leading to his quarterback not making throws he should.
One glaring example was a play later in the season against Green Bay when Trubisky rolled to his left and had a chance to throw downfield. Instead, he tucked the ball and took a sack. It was an ugly play and the first worrisome sign that Fox was corrupting Trubisky’s thinking.
One of the first things Nagy did when taking over was burning that thought process to the ground.
“As far as making mistakes, that’s gonna happen. What I don’t want him to do is I don’t want him to be thinking too much at all. Go out and just let the thing rip. Just let it go, make the throws. We call it card throws. If you’re in practice and you’re a scout team quarterback and you just throw and you really don’t care, you’re just throwing in on time, anticipation throws, that’s what I want from him right now is to do that.
Work on your accuracy. But are your eyes going to where my eyes are going in the progression?…I care what the result of the play is, but I don’t put too much stock this early in it because I want him to just be going. I want our eyes to be going to the same spot right now.”
That sounds nothing like what previous Bears coaches have preached.
Fox? Lovie? Wannstedt? Ditka? All were huge proponents of running the ball, playing defense and marginalizing the quarterback. Nagy clearly has no such plans. He wants to take the shackles off Trubisky. Stop him from thinking about mistakes and just play the game. To do that it is best to put a system around him he knows well. That’s another thing the head coach has planned. Here’s his answer when asked if his system makes sense for Mitch.
“It does. It does. And he’s able to go out there — he played so much shotgun in college at Carolina. So much, and the stuff that we do is easy for him. Now he has to just take that language that he learned in North Carolina, put it into our language, and then what’s going to happen is you’re going to see an evolution to him.”
It’ll be interesting to see what Nagy does differently. Trubisky wasn’t that good from shotgun as a rookie. He threw just two touchdowns to seven interceptions. Granted, the Bears didn’t use a lot of the run-pass option stuff North Carolina did. Whenever they tried, Trubisky seemed to start making plays. One can bet Nagy is aware of this and has no plans to leave it off the table until it’s too late like Fox did.
