The Bears are following the Jaguars on a path to irrelevance

The Bears can't quit Mitch Trubisky and the Jaguars are bringing back the guy who couldn't quite Blake Bortles.

Tuesday, December 31, 2019. That is the day I officially gave up on trying to understand this big dumb league.

While I was still trying to process the Falcons bringing back Dan Quinn (along with offensive coordinator Dirk Koetter, who ran out of ideas years ago and has just been using ‘Ask Madden’ for the past three) and the Giants giving Dave Gettleman another year to complete his quest to win the 1992 NFC East, these two pieces of breaking news popped up on my timeline…

These two stories are technically unrelated … but not really. Before the 2018 Bears team that went 12-4 but lost in the wild card round, we had the 2017 Jaguars: A team that had been carried to the playoffs by an impressive defense but ultimately held back by an incompetent quarterback.

In both situations, the quarterback wasn’t great but he won games and that was good enough. Other scapegoats were found. For the Jaguars, it was the refs, who were obviously on New England’s payroll. For the Bears, it was the kicker. The quarterback had shown enough progress. Another year of development and maybe he’d turn into more than a liability. As for that defensive regression all the nerds kept screaming about? Hogwash. Sure, it burnt those other teams in the past, but these defenses were different.

The Jaguars were so confident in their QB, Blake Bortles, they gave him a contract that no other team in the league would have considered giving him. The Bears were so confident in their QB, Mitch Trubisky, they didn’t bring in any competition at the quarterback position and rolled with Chase Daniel as the backup once again.

A year and 16 miserable games later, the Jaguars had to cut ties with Bortles and eat a record-breaking amount of dead money in order to do so. That allowed the team to put its complete and utter failure all on the quarterback, giving the inept front office some cover. And what did Tom Coughlin do with that cover? He turned around and overpaid another mediocre quarterback. The Jaguars gave Nick Foles an $88 million contract that no other team would have come close to matching. Why? To show the locker room that Foles was THE GUY. He wasn’t the guy for long. After an injury and then four terrible starts, Foles was benched for Gardner Minshew, a sixth-round pick in the most recent draft. Jacksonville is stuck with Foles for at least another season.

Coughlin has been fired but the rest of the team’s brain trust is still in place. Head coach Doug Marrone is coming back. And it appears GM Dave Caldwell, who’s poor performance necessitated the Coughlin hire in the first place, will be pushed back to the top of the front office hierarchy. Remember, Caldwell is the one who drafted Bortles and then doubled down on him when it became apparent that he wasn’t an adequate NFL starter. And his past work in the draft doesn’t inspire much confidence.

I don’t know how smart it is to let Caldwell run a draft in which the Jaguars own two first-round picks, but here we are.

Complacency has long been an issue in Jacksonville, and that ultimately falls on owner Shad Kahn, who always seems to make decisions a year too late. This is a man who allowed Gus Bradley to set a record for coaching incompetence by letting him stick around for FOUR seasons when it became apparent after two that he wasn’t head coaching material.

A year and 16 miserable games later, it’s not too late for Chicago. They still have a chance to avoid the same mistake the Jags made with Bortles and cut ties with Trubisky. It doesn’t sound like that’s going to happen, though. GM Ryan Pace seems to share the same affinity for his mediocre draft pick that Caldwell had for his, and he’s going to give Trubisky one more year to prove the Bears made a smart pick back in 2017.

All Trubisky has to do is, um, learn to read a defense and throw the ball accurately over the offseason. You know, the two most fundamental aspects of playing the quarterback position.

Of course, the most likely outcome is Trubisky falling flat on his face again and Pace losing his job. But who knows? Maybe the defense returns to its 2018 form (is this starting to sound familiar, Jacksonville?) and the offense does just enough to get the Bears back to the playoffs. Then what happens? Trubisky gets his Bortles deal and, oh god … you can just ask Jaguars fans what happens after that.

With the Bears doubling down on Trubisky, that might be your best-case scenario, Chicago. But don’t get too down. As depressing as all of that sounds, it could be worse. You could be rooting for the Jaguars, who are still running it back after all these years.