IT’S ALL BECOMING CLEARER NOW
Trubisky’s response to red-zone pick was ‘a sign’ to his QB coach
It wasn’t one of Mitch Trubisky’s three touchdown passes last Thursday night against the Cowboys that most impressed his quarterbacks coach. It wasn’t his season-high 63 rushing yards, either.
Rather, Dave Ragone remembered his exchange with Trubisky as he reached the sideline after his biggest mistake of the game: an interception at the front left pylon to end the Bears’ first possession.
Speaking with Ragone, Trubisky was able to diagnose — without the benefit of replay or clues from his teammates — precisely what went wrong. And then he didn’t make the same mistake twice.
“I’ve been through this before,” Ragone said Tuesday. “Different look. [He] goes right back out there. The defense does an unbelievable job of getting us the ball back. He goes right back out there and leads the rest of the game as if that pick never happened.
“Just the look in his eyes,” Ragone added. “Obviously, being with him — the ability to understand what just happened and to translate that and process it and give back the communication . . . to be able to see something that just happened probably within four to five seconds, spit it back at me without having seen the pictures, I think that in itself provides clarity — communication from the quarterback to me that I am seeing the same things.”
That hasn’t always been the case with Trubisky. But he has had “clearer, sharper” practices lately, Ragone said, and his communication on the sideline “has been the best it’s been” in the three years they’ve been together.
“That comes with time — I’m not sure on anybody’s timetable but his own,” Ragone said. “That was a great sign. Of all the signs that happened that game, to me, as his position coach, that was the most important: How is he going to react to an interception in the red area? He’s been good in the red area. He bounced back. The confidence, if anything, it didn’t waver. It grew throughout that game.
“Especially for myself, I’m looking for those types of signs — from a maturity standpoint, from a mental standpoint, not just the physical part of it — to see where he’s potentially going in his career.”
“Career,” of course, is the operative word. The uptick in Trubisky’s play over the last five games — of which the Bears have won four — bodes well for his status as the starter next season. Over the next three games, though, the Bears need to see that he’s continuing on an upward trajectory. A false positive could set the team back years.
Just as coach Matt Nagy and offensive coordinator Mark Helfrich did last week, Ragone preached the benefits of the confidence that comes with success.
“I think you’ve seen it the last couple weeks — there’s a different sense of taking the field,” Ragone said. “Not just the result of the play.”
Given Trubisky’s recent improvement, Ragone spoke as though the weight of expectation had been lifted off his quarterback’s shoulders.
“You have to go through that,” he said. “You can prep a guy all you want. This is a great football town, a tremendous football town, so there’s expectations, right? There’s all those things that go with it.
“To be able to live through it this year — and obviously last year and since we’ve been here — I think, more than anything else, it’s how you manage the pressure moving forward. It’s always going to be there . ... That’s something you can tell, by his makeup, is what he wants.”