FanPost

2019 Vivisection

Normally you wait until the end of a lost season to do the autopsy and try to figure out what went wrong. I'm not that patient right now and have absolutely no faith that this is going to be anything other than a shoulda-coulda-woulda season that's going to contribute to me not being on this site between the end of Week 17 and the draft, maybe. Plus I think I might start writing catharsis sketches again if/when the losing continues, and I want this more serious post out of the way before I try to figure out how to put comedic spins on our cast of characters this time around.

So here's where I think we're going wrong:

Pace: Really likes to draft for potential and not for achievements or tangibles or whatever you want to call them. He really likes to do this with his higher round picks because he's trying to hit home runs on every swing, especially in the first round. So far Floyd and Smith have turned out ok, Goldman's been good, but Floyd has massively underperformed for the spot he was picked in when he plays any team that isn't the Packers.* Smith is still new enough where I'm inclined to give him some room. On the other hand, this same guy picked Shaheen, White, and Trubisky, among others - maybe his approach is just completely garbage for offensive players. Regardless, he seems to draft based on what he thinks the guy's theoretical lifetime potential is instead of things he's demonstrated he knows how to do or are more reasonably visible in his future, which makes me think of the "I'm the smartest guy in the room and I'm going to prove it" effect that may or may not be derived from Moneyball. Picking Trubisky over Watson is a great example of this - Trubisky had demonstrated basically nothing. He started 13 games on a subpar team, couldn't beat the guy that went undrafted the year before, and was clearly very unused to the spotlight. Watson had just done one of the biggest things in college football (beating Alabama in the title game when Alabama hadn't lost in two seasons) and Pace ignored all of that for a "who the Hell is this" pick.

Nagy: Still a newbie head coach. He seems incapable of translating his offense from what's in his head to a language that Trubisky can understand, which is something similar to what we saw from Trestman, who couldn't get through to Jay Cutler but made Josh McCown look like Football Jesus for a half-dozen games. Also, like most coaches, seems incapable of adapting in-game when his team has problems. Loves to pass the ball, but has a grossly inadequate #1 quarterback, and the #2 is low-grade at best. Sometimes he seems to get his team ready to do one or two new things in a game to specifically address whatever went wrong last week, but it never seems to stick. Hopefully a lot of this is due to him still being a new head coach and he'll be able to get his head above water somehow. But I'm really not impressed with his dumb in-game decisions or the thing about him doing a PowerPoint on the Washington Nationals. I've sat through more PowerPoints than I care to count and all those motivate me to do is contemplate new and efficient ways of committing suicide so that I don't have to look at more PowerPoint slides. Like Pace, he seems incapable of doing the occasional conventional things you seem to need to do unless you're Bill Belichick. You can't always run gadget plays and try to do weird stuff, especially when it constantly misfires. Nagy doesn't seem to understand that.

Trubisky: ...yeah. He's bad and he's dumb. I have a feeling we drafted our version of Christian Ponder. Some of it isn't his fault. Pace's aforementioned problem with drafting for what he thinks potential means instead of achievement meant that he traded up to pick one of the biggest project QBs in that draft with the #2 pick. I'll say now what I said then: I wanted us to draft Deshaun Watson. Yeah, that's based on a sample size of one game. It also was the most important game in college football that year and Watson clearly wasn't being carried by his defense despite himself. Trubisky wasn't able to get his team anywhere before we drafted him based on haruspicy, apparently. He looks lost and scared every game these days. The bit about "please turn the TVs off, they hurt my feelings" is just infuriating. Dude, you need to get a thicker freaking skin. This is one of the things I don't think Pace realized would be an issue by picking a project from a lesser known football school - UNC does not get the attention that schools in the SEC or Big Ten get, so UNC players aren't going to be used to hearing their names and school on TV every day unless something completely insane happens. Trubisky could have put earmuffs on in his rookie season ("Fox is dumb!"), and he didn't really need them his second season ("Everything on our defense is awesooooooome!"), but now that he's obviously a huge part of the problem he can't do that any more, and he's not used to it. Consequently it's getting into his head, especially since he can't count on a worldbreaking defense bailing him out almost every game this year. There's no way that isn't somehow contributing to him being awful, and coping strategies for this are collectively one of the things he might have learned with another year or two in college, since it isn't like he could go back in time and transfer to LSU or Oklahoma or Ohio State or something.

The X-Factor of Awful: Trubisky barely runs this season. It seems like he's barely run since he got hurt last year. I don't know if that's on him or Nagy or both, but they need to figure it out. Moving around makes up for some of his shortfalls, because he's obviously garbage as a traditional pocket guy. It could be "I don't want to get hurt again, so I'm not going to run" from Trubisky, it could be "running the ball is for chumps, I'm throwing it 40 times a game with this guy who doesn't know what he's doing" from Nagy, or a mix. I think some of it is other teams realizing they can physically intimidate Trubisky into not running. This is a total reach on my part, but I don't care: While I was listening to the Philly game on the radio, I heard that at some point one of the Philly players hit Trubisky late when he was running and drew a 15-yard penalty. It was the Philly broadcast, and even their broadcasters described it as a stupid penalty, but taken in conjunction with Trubisky's feelings problem, it makes me think the Eagles (or at least the one who hit Trubisky) figured they could afford to take a couple of penalties to reinforce to Trubisky that "you are not running or you are going to get beaten up no matter what happens". That's winning calculus for them - Trubisky struggles to beat all but the very worst teams as a pocket guy, so if you can make sure he stays there, you're probably going to win. I think Jim Schwartz is still the Eagles' DC and Schwartz is a thug who would definitely go for the "take a couple of penalties if it means we scare him into being less effective" way of handling things.

There are other problems, mostly on offense (TEs garbage again, O-line subpar again), but the big three listed above are the wellspring from which all other ills derive. This ain't a "our QB would be great if he wasn't always running for his life" or a "our HC struggles with clock management but is decent or great at everything else" or whatever situation. Our QB and HC are both inexperienced and our GM likes to take high-rounders based on lifetime potential instead of whatever criteria he's using on late-round players, when he seems to have more success than he should.

* On the one hand I'm ok with a Packer-killer, but on the other hand I really wish he could be better against enough other teams on a regular basis to give us a few more wins overall, whether or not he's good specifically against the Packers or not.

This Fanpost was written by a Windy City Gridiron member and does not necessarily reflect the ideas or opinions of its staff or community.