Bears coach Matt Nagy stepped into the familiar position Thursday of trying to grapple with something his quarterback said.
Mitch Trubisky grew tired of seeing TV shows ripping him and his team on the many flat screens around Halas Hall and said Wednesday he wanted them turned off. Nagy downplayed it as more of a joke than an issue of Trubisky’s confidence.
“Just me knowing him and knowing how he is, I’m assuming there’s a little tongue in cheek there with how he said it,” Nagy said.
Trubisky gave the sound bite in response to a question about ignoring outside opinions on social media and elsewhere. While it’s possible his opening line about “trying to get some of these TVs in the building turned off” wasn’t totally serious, what followed was hardly in jest.
“You’ve got too many people talking on TV about us and what they think about us — what we should do, what we are and what we’re not — but they don’t really know who we are, or what we’re capable of as people, or what we’re going through, or what we’re thinking,” he said. “It’s just the outside viewers looking in.”
The week after Trubisky’s dud in the season opener, he caused a stir when he responded to a question on the game by saying he wasn’t allowed to talk about it. Nagy said his player misunderstood a message from a staffer about moving forward.
Last week, coming off a brutal fourth-quarter meltdown in a loss to the Chargers, Trubisky said Nagy instructed him to watch the broadcast of the game so he could see how bad his body language was. Nagy said he hoped it would give him a glimpse of how his teammates view him.
Nagy maintained that Trubisky’s aversion to media coverage of his struggles — his 80.0 passer rating is fourth-worst in the NFL — is a positive, but acknowledged he’s feeling the pressure of the Bears’ four-game losing streak.
“I think everybody is, really,” Nagy said. “It circles back to the quarterback position. That comes with the territory... We all realize that he’s getting a lot of heat right now.
“I don’t know the context exactly how [the TVs remark] was said. Hey, everybody has an opinion right? If that’s how he feels, he’s entitled to it.”
