The Learning Channel
Sunday’s Mahomes-Watson matchup might be tough to watch. But it should be appointment TV for the Bears brass.
Some NFL coaches and players choose not to watch the playoffs if they’re not involved. Too painful, perhaps. Better ways to decompress. It just feels like a repellent.
Bears coach Matt Nagy is not a member of that fraternity.
Nope, Nagy needs the playoffs in his veins. Even as a spectator, it provides a fix. He can’t look away.
“I watch it,” Nagy said late last month. “I do. Some people just shut it off. They don’t want to be a part of it. To each their own. I just think you learn from it.
“For me, it burns me up the fact that I’m sitting at home and watching. I use that as my own personal motivation to get back there.”
You wonder then what Nagy was thinking and feeling as he watched on the Saturday evening of wild-card weekend. You wonder how he reacted as Texans quarterback Deshaun Watson hauled his team out of a 16-0 hole in the second half, rallying it into overtime with a combination of calm and confidence.
You wonder whether Nagy sprang from his seat like most of the audience when Watson faced an all-out Bills blitz on the final drive in overtime, got hit hard from his left and then his right, yet somehow managed to spin and stay on his feet, scrambling and dropping a clutch completion to running back Taiwan Jones.
The magic act produced a 34-yard gain that set up the Texans’ winning 28-yard field goal. It was, perhaps, the signature moment of wild-card weekend.
And now it gives Nagy another game to dial in on Sunday afternoon. Watson’s Texans move on to face Nagy’s mentor, Andy Reid, and Nagy’s former team, the Chiefs. The Chiefs are led by a superstar quarterback Nagy helped groom: Patrick Mahomes. Watson versus Mahomes. With a trip to the AFC championship game on the line.
With the Bears in the very uncomfortable role as subtext.
How could Nagy not watch?
One more time
Yes, this dead horse has been beaten to a pulp. The Bears passed on Watson and Mahomes in the 2017 draft, trading up to No. 2 to select Mitch Trubisky instead. It was a decision far more layered and complicated than many kneejerk critics want to acknowledge. And it’s a landmark moment that can become unfairly twisted by revisionist history.
Still, this is Chicago’s reality. And if Bears fans have already grown tired of the leaguewide admiration showered on Watson and Mahomes, if they have become agitated and exhausted by the constant “What might have been” lament, imagine if this is only the beginning.
What if Watson versus Mahomes becomes a regular January duel on the playoff stage?
What if Sunday is just the opening act of a decade-long rivalry in which two top-tier quarterbacks continue to run into each other on their chase for a Lombardi Trophy?
And what if the Bears remain curious couch potatoes left to envy it all?
Given all we know about Nagy’s tight relationship with general manager Ryan Pace and what we know about Nagy’s attraction to playoff football, one can guess the two Bears leaders will speak this weekend or at least send a flurry of texts as the postseason action continues.
Both men have promised to fix the problems with Trubisky and the Bears offense that turned 2019 into, in Pace’s words, “a season of regression.”
And that’s where Sunday’s Texans-Chiefs game could have real value if the Bears’ biggest decision makers can view it through honest eyes.
That play Watson made in overtime to help secure his first playoff victory wasn’t how it was drawn up in the Texans playbook. And it certainly didn’t unfold in the way it was practiced at any point that week.
Quite simply, it was a dynamic playmaker digging deep and making a play when his team needed him to. When his blockers failed him. When his athleticism and competitiveness helped him avoid a sack and a third-and-long and instead produced a game-winning play. In the playoffs.
“I just told myself to stay up,” Watson told ESPN’s Lisa Salters immediately after the game. “It’s do-or-die right now, and with all of that work I’ve been putting in in the offseason, I just had to make a play. I told the guys before the game, I put a card in their lockers and I said, ‘Let’s be great today.’ So somebody had to be great. Why not me?”
‘There to be made’
Scan the highlights of Mahomes’ two seasons as a starter — the 17 300-yard games, the 76 regular-season touchdown passes, the 23 Chiefs victories in his 30 starts — and it’s easy to find examples of similar playmaking wizardry, of a star who has a knack for turning nothing into something on a consistent basis.
Read those last eight words again with emphasis. Turning nothing into something. On a consistent basis.
That’s what the Bears admit Trubisky has lacked in so many areas. Consistency.
“You see moments this year: ‘Aha! There it is!’ ” Pace said Dec. 31 at his end-of-season news conference. “And then we see the inconsistencies and the dips. You know? We need to figure out why that’s happening and work hard to solve that.”
As it relates to playmaking prowess, the inconsistency has become too jarring to ignore, the quality that has widened the gap between Trubisky and his two more accomplished draft classmates.
Trubisky’s flashes this season were the exception. Too many examples exist where Trubisky had first downs or big plays or game-changing touchdown passes waiting but didn’t hit them.
Sometimes he didn’t see the opportunity and didn’t throw.
At times he threw too far.
Or not far enough. Against the Chiefs in Week 16, Trubisky overshot Allen Robinson on what should have been a 46-yard touchdown pass, and Nagy was left to deliver the cold truth on why that play — welldesigned, well-timed, wellblocked — didn’t connect.
“I know it’s simple,” Nagy said. “I’m just saying when you get opportunities in a game, those are ones there where we all want to do our job.”
Later that week, after detailing the reality that the Bears need to get Trubisky more help on the offensive line and at tight end and with the way plays are called, Nagy was asked whether the best way of lifting the offense relied on the quarterback to make more plays when there are plays to be made.
After all, on Thanksgiving Day in Detroit and a week later against the Cowboys, when Trubisky flashed his playmaking ability, the Bears won. Suddenly everyone in the organization and around town felt great.
Aha!
Right?
So isn’t some of this as simple as that? That the most important player on the roster just needs to make more plays when there are plays to be made?
“That’s a part of it,” Nagy said. “There’s realness to that. … If I’m in there and we’re going through a play and it’s a bad play call, I’m going to tell you it’s a bad play call. And that it could be better. And that it’s my fault. But then on the other end, OK, if we’re going to get this thing right, you better be honest with your side too.
“When a play is there to be made, you’ve got to make it. That’s the part where we’ve got to get both of those fixed. And we will. It takes good people and a collaboration and understanding the whys to do that. And that’s going to be our No. 1 focus.”
The stage is set
Unfortunately for the Bears, the Texans and Chiefs aren’t experiencing those same growing pains.
While Nagy and Pace are busy collaborating to help Trubisky become, in Nagy’s words, “a master at understanding coverages,” while they are looking for ways to improve Trubisky’s footwork and trust in the pocket, Watson and Mahomes have reached a more advanced stage.
They’re immersed in the highs of playoff football, eyeing the next big play that ignites the next big win.
Mahomes’ ascent hit a speed bump this year when he dislocated his right kneecap in October, a serious injury that came on the heels of a sprained left ankle. He missed 2½ games.
But since his return, he has completed 66.7% of his passes, thrown for 1,851 yards and 11 touchdowns and posted a 99.3 passer rating. The Chiefs finished the regular season on a six-game tear that earned them a firstround playoff bye.
Bears fans saw firsthand in Week 16 what it looks like when Mahomes takes control of a game and doesn’t let go. The Chiefs came to Chicago and bounced the Bears out of the playoff hunt with a 26-3 tail-kicking.
After Watson’s own struggles contributed to that 16-0 deficit last Saturday against the Bills, he rallied to lead four scoring drives in his final six possessions. During that span, he went 13-for-14 passing for 193 yards and a touchdown. He added a 20-yard touchdown run, a two-point conversion run and a two-point conversion pass.
Somebody had to be great, right?
Watson and Mahomes have helped their teams win back-toback division championships. Both have earned consecutive invitations to the Pro Bowl. Both of their teams believe they can reach the Super Bowl next month.
This is the sustained success — frequently sparked by great quarterback play — that so often eludes the Bears, who are left clinging to flashes.
Yet that’s where Sunday’s Texans-Chiefs game can prove illuminating, offering a lens into what the Bears are seeking.
The more plays Watson and Mahomes make, the more opportunity Pace will have to see what top-tier quarterback play looks like. And if he can’t see it, Nagy will have to remind him.
These are the things we need out of our quarterback. And if Trubisky can’t provide them soon, then we better have urgent plans to find someone who can.
Publicly, anyway, Pace has been unwilling to concede that his decision to pick Trubisky over Watson and Mahomes was a misstep. Asked last week where the Bears missed in their pre-draft evaluation of Trubisky, Pace bobbed and weaved.
“I don’t think we’re there yet,” he said. “We’re still watching the guy grow. Again, he knows he needs to be more consistent. He knows he needs to play better. We know that too.”
Pressed on how he views Trubisky’s ceiling as an NFL starter after this turbulent and inconsistency-riddled third season, Pace said Trubisky’s potential is “wide open.”
“If we go back and look at a lot of young quarterbacks in the league,” Pace said, “historically, these (low) moments have occurred. It’s just part of the growth process sometimes.”
Pace isn’t wrong. Not all young quarterbacks arrive in the NFL and hit the moving walkway to prolonged excellence. It’s just that the two quarterbacks the Bears passed on three years ago did.
And now they’re facing each other in the playoffs. With the Bears and their success-starved fan base watching from home and possibly compiling more reasons to be burned up.
It promises to be an entertaining and revealing show. Depending on how you look at it.