Mitch Trubisky had a long day against the Packers.
The next three weren’t much better.
“It was a long, weird weekend after playing on Thursday and then just sitting on that for a couple days,” Trubisky said Wednesday. “Got to think about it a lot and see what went wrong.”
The Bears held a walk-through Monday, making Wednesday’s practice the most strenuous work Trubisky did since six days earlier, when the Bears lost 10-3 to their rivals.
That’s a long time for anyone to sit and think — much less Trubisky, who is notoriously hard on himself.
“He cares a lot,” backup quarterback Chase Daniel said. “And when things don’t go the right way, or when we don’t win, he puts a lot of the blame of the loss on himself.”
The long weekend — “Three days to really dwell on it, which you’re not supposed to,” Trubisky said — didn’t help. Trubisky hung out with his girlfriend and texted with his teammates. He watched film of the loss and began preparing for the Broncos.
“It’s a little weird to play the opening game of the season on Thursday and then you’ve got to wait like three, four, five days to get to the next practice,” Daniel said. “If we win, that’s a great weekend.
“I think we’ve really moved on. I think he’s at a really good place.”
Subdued and serious, Trubisky seemed to already have his game face on Wednesday.
What lies ahead is daunting. With Super Bowl-caliber teammates, Trubisky played the most disappointing game of his career Thursday, only calling into starker contrast the difference between him and the other two first-round picks in his draft class: reigning MVP Patrick Mahomes and Texans quarterback Deshaun Watson.
What awaits him is the defensive mind that knows him best: Broncos head coach Vic Fangio, whose specialty is trying to blur his zone coverage to make them indistinguishable at the line of scrimmage. The Bears need to know “where the bones are buried” once they identify the zone, coach Matt Nagy said.
Trubisky matched up against Fangio, the former Bears coordinator, the last two seasons in practice.
“Especially in [the] two-minute [drill] … he’d like jump around and throw his playsheet in the air if they made a play,” Trubisky said. “He’s super-competitive and we loved that about Vic, but we’ve got to make sure we’re on the right end of it this week. I
“If we go out there and do our jobs I think we’ll be happy with the result.”
Trubisky wasn’t in the mood to be light Wednesday. Asked about his decision to hand off on a third-and-1 run-pass option, Trubisky glanced at a public relations staffer. He said he “was told not to talk about the last game,” but then explained his thinking about certain aspects of it.
Asked to name one area where the offense needed to improve, Trubisky chose three.
“Just fast operation, in and out of the huddle,” he said. “Everyone on the same page and doing our jobs. And playing with confidence.”
Getting in and out of the huddle more efficiently, he said, is rooted in “less thinking, more communicating, and more playing fast.”
Asked to find one area that he felt good about, Trubisky said the ball came out of his hand well. But even then, he steered the topic back to offensive mistakes.
“You have a couple plays early on in the game that went our way and we might be looking at a whole different ballgame,” he said. “But that’s not how football is. That’s not how life is.”
It certainly wasn’t that way against the Packers. With the perhaps the most telling game of his career on the horizon, Trubisky is ready to turn the page on his disappointing start.
“We’re still positive about it,” he said. “We’re still confident in what we can be as an offense. And we just gotta go out there and play that way this week.”
