Congratulations, Chicago Bears. The results are in. You drafted Andy Dalton with the No. 2 overall pick in the 2017 NFL Draft and you traded up to get him.
The Chicago Bears were done with the Mike Glennon Drive-Thru Experiment in 2016. Turns out, being tall is not a convertible attribute when it comes to winning football games. So the Bears stunk to high heaven that season and needed to desperately draft a franchise quarterback.
Two-and-a-half years later and we now have the results from the Bears’ decision to take Mitchell Trubisky No. 2 overall out of North Carolina in 2017.
Congratulations, Bears. You drafted Andy Dalton.
Not only did you draft the NFC version of Dalton, but you traded up with the San Francisco 49ers from No. 3 to No. 2 to get him.
At least the Cincinnati Bengals made the playoffs five straight years with Dalton as their starting quarterback from 2011-15. Better yet, they didn’t use a first-round pick on the “Red Rifle” coming out of TCU. The Bengals drafted a player worth a top-five pick in wide receiver A.J. Green out of Georgia.
But you just needed Trubisky, now didn’t you, Bears…
Trubisky threw the ball 54 times in a loss to the New Orleans Saints on Sunday afternoon. The score was closer than the game indicated, but this was the performance of a borderline-starting quarterback and nothing more. When you average 4.6 yards per attempt and garner a QBR of 33.5, the Dalton comparisons only seem fair.
“The Beige Water Pistol” now has an NFC counterpart in the “Midwest Bortles,” making the Monsters of the Midway less intimidating one Derek Carr checkdown at a time. Like Dalton, Carr was taken in the second round in his NFL Draft and not traded up for in the first round like Trubisky. He went where he was supposed to coming out of Fresno State to the Oakland Raiders.
With their powers combined, they are Captain Checkdown, averaging close to 10 yards per attempt, all between the 20s and never doing much in the red zone. Chicago really thought it had its next Sid Luckman, but instead, is left dreaming of the rocket-armed aloofness of Smoking Jay Cutler. At least those incompletions would be 20 yards downfield.
So while the Bears have to deal with the aftermath of general manager Ryan Pace’s head-scratching decision, let’s not forget for a second that Clemson Tigers head coach Dabo Swinney was right. Passing on his college quarterback Deshaun Watson would be like passing on Michael Jordan.
So if Watson is Jordan, does that make Trubisky … Sam Bowie? Well, he’s not Hakeem Olajuwon. That’s for sure. The Olajuwon of the 2017 draft was another quarterback in Patrick Mahomes, who the Bears also passed on for Trubisky.
So continue to enjoy NFC Andy Dalton, Bears. As long as he’s your quarterback, this is what you signed up for. Playmakers on three!