Mitch Trubisky is the Bears starting quarterback. He was not benched for poor play against the Rams. He has a hip pointer. And the Bears do not know/aren’t saying whether Trubisky will be sufficiently recovered from his hip pointer to start next Sunday against the New York Giants.
Other questions may continue to swirl around coach Matt Nagy’s handling of Trubisky and the reported hip injury that caused the coach to pull the quarterback late in the fourth quarter of the Bears’ fifth loss in their last six games. And those other questions on Monday contained variations on the Watergate theme of, “What did he know and when did he know it?”
Nagy met the questions head-on, beginning with the injury itself – “[Trubisky] has a right hip pointer. It happened on the sack at the end of the second quarter. He took a knee by [defensive tackle Michael Brockers] right into the hip/lower back.”
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And Nagy laid out how he and Bears staff handled the situation, start to finish, including preparing backup quarterback Chase Daniel to replace Trubisky if needed, which he was.
“I knew about it; I knew [Trubisky] had a hip deal but it wasn’t significant enough to not play,” Nagy said. “But over time the stiffness got to a point where he really wasn’t able to sit on the bleachers, on the bench.
“That’s when I became aware of it and kept an eye on him for about a series and a half. Even before [the Rams] scored the touchdown to go up 10, we had already made the decision that we were going to go with Chase.”
Nagy and Trubisky put their heads close together in the discussion that led to the quarterback being pulled, before which neither TV cameras nor sideline reporters provided information on Daniel warming up. But Nagy, who said that he went directly at Trubisky with questions about his viability to continue playing, also said that Daniel had, including taking snaps with center Cody Whitehair.
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Despite the injury to his quarterback, Nagy made an ill-advised call of an option to the short side of the field on a third-and-one in the second half. The call Nagy said he would do differently, but said that the play was before the hip soreness and stiffness had reached the point of impairment.
And there is no thought, either on the part of coach or player, of shutting Trubisky down, for whatever reasons.
“We’ll see where he’s at,” Nagy said. “As we go here the next couple days, we’ll see where he’s at, but [being shut down is] not what he wants and that’s not what we want. We want to keep growing.”
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