Mitch Trubisky subtly bristled at the notion that a pep talk from his high school coach last week was some kind of planned confidence-booster.
“I talk to my high school coaches every week,” Trubisky said Wednesday. “Usually they’re just checking on me; [I’m] seeing how they’re doing … and we just stay in contact. We have a really close relationship.”
But they’re building up your confidence, right?
“They don’t have to do that. I can do that myself,” Trubisky said.
If Trubisky has a confidence issue, it’s almost certain that there’s nothing his high school coach or his college coach can say that will rectify it. The Bears have gone out of their way to make sure Trubisky is feeling good about himself, likes himself and knows that everybody at Halas Hall has the utmost confidence in him.
Whether you are Trubisky’s relative, close friend, confidante, coach, former coach or just a guy with Trubisky on your fantasy team, the “advice” is the same: play better football. Focus. Concentrate. Learn. Grow up. Just get better. That’s the only confidence builder that will help Trubisky 33 starts into his NFL career. It’s not like he forgot how to play football. He’s just not playing it very well right now.
Feeling good about himself is a factor in rectifying that. But knowing his coaches believe in him and know he can do it — whether it’s Mentor High School coach Steve Trivisonno or former North Carolina coach Larry Fedora — or Bears coach Matt Nagy, for that matter — isn’t going to suddenly give Trubisky the self-assurance he needs to succeed.
At this point of an NFL quarterback’s career, the more voices he hears the worse it’s going to get. The more he hears how much everyone believes in him, he eventually will start wondering why everybody is telling him how much they believe in him. It will become detrimental if it hasn’t already.
Trubisky is doing his best to prop himself up, convincing himself that the discouraging regression of this season — after going to the Pro Bowl as an alternate last season — isn’t affecting his psyche.
“It’s been good,” he said when asked about the process of handling a disappointing season. “It’s been a learning experience, just going through this and dealing with situations, and a season going up and down is not going the way you expected it to go.
“Sometimes, kind of like we did last year, we’ve got to throw expectations out the window. They don’t really matter and, even though that is usually my mind-set, that’s what you’ve got to do — take it one day, one week at a time; control what you can control and that’s your attitude and how hard you work.
“So that’s what I’m going to continue to do. If you take a step back and say, ‘Ok, it is what it is.’ This is where we’re at right now. How can we fix things? How can we get better from here?”
This season isn’t what Trubisky expected. It’s about the worse-case scenario considering how promising things looked for himself and the offense in Nagy’s second season. Though there are almost zero indicators things are about to change, he’s kept his cool throughout — hoping that some age-old cliches are true: everything happens for a reason; and “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”
“Even though we haven’t had success on the field, I think from a personal standpoint I can say I’ve grown in other ways outside of football,” Trubisky said. “Just dealing with this adversity and seeing how my mind-set is every day and how are you able to eventually overcome that and deal with that, try to still get better and not make it a negative.”
It remains to be seen if that maturity off the field will yield results on the field. But if it’s a matter of confidence, the only person who can help Mitch Trubisky at this point is himself.
