It seems like a foregone conclusion that Ryan Pace’s job is safe. But should it be?

The 2019 Bears are looking at a 6-10 season, just one win better than the embarrassing, dysfunctional 2014 team Pace inherited. We haven’t gotten the consecutive embarrassing losses or locker room fights like we did in 2014, but there’s still time.

The talent levels of the teams aren’t all that different when you consider very few of the offensive starters from the 2019 version would start for the 2014 team and the gigantic difference at quarterback. This defense is a lot better than the 2014 unit but you could still argue a couple defenders from that squad — Jay Ratliff and Willie Young — would start on this year’s defense.

2019 will never reach 2014 in terms of dysfunction, but they may be well past them in terms of disappointment.

The Bears will be winning fewer than eight games for the fourth time in Pace’s five years as general manager and his decision to take Mitchell Trubisky over a sure thing in Deshaun Watson and a guy some already consider to be the best quarterback they’ve ever seen in Patrick Mahomes has become a joke. NFL owners don’t like when their team is a joke.

One can argue that Pace actually built a very strong and talented roster, but this is a quarterback’s league and is there’s any reason to think Pace can get that position right?

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Matt Nagy’s decision to sit on the ball late Sunday, instead of trying to line up for a more manageable field goal, was further confirmation of what we already know: he needs a new quarterback. While Twitter experts go back-and-forth on who is to blame, the simple truth is that Nagy doesn’t trust Mitch Trubisky. As long as that’s the case, the Bears can’t win.

It wasn’t always the case.

In a similar situation in the playoff loss last year, the head coach let Trubisky throw deep. Had Trubisky thrown accurately there would have been no such thing as “the double doink”. Somewhere along the way (Week One, perhaps?) Trubisky lost his coach’s faith. And he isn’t doing anything to get it back. Week-by-week, the quarterback misses reads, misses throws and loses.

At this point, arguing for Trubisky is admitting bias. Even when the quarterback does good things, he also makes big mistakes and Sunday was a classic example. It could’ve been one of the best games of the young quarterback’s career. He made throws down the field. He thread the needle in a tight spot. For the first time all season, he made a play with his legs.

But he still lost the game.

He threw a horrendous, demoralizing interception.

He missed a wide open touchdown.

He then fumbled to set up the game-winning drive.

How could anybody ask Nagy to call a play in which the quarterback could lose the game when he was looking at an easy field goal? When it came down to trusting his young kicker or his young quarterback, Nagy chose the kicker.

Turns out there was no right choice.

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If the Chicago Bears think they are going to improve on their own this season, they’re going to fade into 2019 irrelevance, just as they have for most of the last 30 years.

There isn’t an easy fix for these Bears, but with the trade deadline coming next Tuesday, there are a pair of big moves that could get them back on track and save what was supposed to be a Super Bowl season. And, if they can’t pull those off, there’s a third move that could make the future at least a little brighter.

Trade for Nick Foles

He isn’t necessarily the franchise quarterback the fan base has been longing for, but he’s at least competent. Foles is very likely the best the Bears can do at quarterback for the rest of this season. He knows the offense and has excelled in it. He’d bring instant credibility to the offense and knows how to get the job done at the highest level.

The 30-year-old has been on IR since Week One, but he’s slated to begin practicing this week, opening up a 21-day window for activation. We don’t know when, exactly, he’d be ready, but he could return in Week 10. It has generally been reported that he won’t be eligible to play until Week 11 but that, presumably, is because the Jaguars have a Week 10 bye.

The Jaguars would have to eat a lot of money in order to trade Foles, but they’d still have to pay that money and then Foles’ salary in order to keep him. With rookie Gardner Minshew playing well (10 touchdowns and 2 interceptions) the Jaguars likely will want to move on from Foles at some point.

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Reality came quickly for Marcus Mariota, as the former second pick overall was benched Sunday for Ryan Tannehill. His tenure as the starting quarterback of the Tennessee Titans seems to have come to an end after four seasons and change.

Mariota’s story should serve as a warning for Mitch Trubisky who, for better of worse, has eleven games to show the Chicago Bears if he’s the quarterback of their future. If the Bears are smart, they won’t wait any longer than that, or waste any more time, to make their judgment about the most position in all of sports.

Like Trubisky, Mariota was expected to make a big leap in his third season, after throwing 26 touchdowns in his second. He was expected to become the franchise quarterback nearly everyone – which included Ryan Pace – thought he was destined to be.

But Mariota never took off. His third season was a bust with (13 TDs/15 INTs). His fourth season showed some promise (11/8), but included numerous injuries and ultimately most of his success came running the football. The most complimentary way to describe his start to 2019 was ineffective.

Perhaps Mariota will rebound, most likely somewhere else? History tells us he won’t.

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The weeks after the bye week will tell us a lot about the Bears head coach and whether he really is the genius he was portrayed as or just another in a long line of coaches who got off to hot starts, but couldn’t adjust.

Typically, teams with great coaches excel in the area of their coach’s expertise. That isn’t a good sign for Nagy, whose Bears are 28th in scoring and 30th in yardage through five games. That comes after they struggled for much of the second half last year, including just one offensive touchdown in a playoff loss.

The offense is broken and Nagy needs to fix it.

The problems start at the offensive line where the Bears made an offseason decision to swap Cody Whitehair and James Daniels, a move that has made them definitively worse at two positions. Add in the clear regression of Charles Leno Jr. and an aging Kyle Long and you have one of the worst units in the league.

Then, of course, there are issues at quarterback. The move to 202 stalled out when Nagy admitted they had to simplify the offense for Mitch Trubisky. A simplification isn’t a bad thing, but it’s the second time they’ve had to do that this year, cutting back after they broke training camp. We were told not to read too much into that.

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Even after Taylor Gabriel exits concussion protocol and returns to the starting lineup, Matt Nagy must find a way to keep Javon Wims on the field. The second-year WR did not dominate on Sunday. Far from it. And he certainly isn’t getting confused for Randy Moss anytime soon. But his performance against the Vikings stood out enough for him to be given a chance to help this offense escape their current rut.

His presence gives the team another big target, which could be help a quarterback who struggles keeping the ball down. Chase Daniel used Wims’ size multiple times in the game, most notably on a 37-yard lob that helped the Bears get out of the shadow of their own end zone. The pass ended up being under thrown, but Wims made a nice adjustment in the air to make it look like a back-shoulder throw. Daniel probably wouldn’t have thrown the pass if he didn’t think the receiver could win a jump ball.

Wims can adjust in the air. That we knew. But that played showed he can also get deep. He roasted Trae Waynes and it would’ve been a much bigger gain had the throw been on-target. That speed is new to Wims and something Prince Amukamara noted in the off-season:

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One of the most important assessments Ryan Pace made this off-season was that the running backs – and not the offensive line – were to fault for the running game’s struggles in 2018. Through most of three quarters Monday night, he looked dead wrong.

Then one possession clinched the game and provided hope that the offensive line can regain the form it showed in 2018. The Bears had run for just 50 yards. Their defense was tired after forcing yet another turnover. They didn’t just need a score, they needed time.

The guys up front came through.

David Montgomery ran for eight yards on the first play. Four on the next. He looked bottled up on the third play, but was able to find a hole after a cutback for 25. After a pass for eight yards to keep the drive alive on a third-and-five play, the Bears were able to drive to the 20 to get inside the range of an injured Eddy Pineiro who clinched the game with a 38-yard field goal.

Not All Trubisky

While most of the negative attention early in the season has been focused on quarterback Mitch Trubisky, the offensive line had been arguably the worst part of the team through two weeks.

Coach Matt Nagy took a lot of heat for not calling more running plays in Week 1, but the Bears weren’t getting any push. The same was mostly true in Week 2, as the offense averaged 3.8 yards per carry outside of one explosive run.

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After two wonky games to officially open the NFL season, we’re soon to find out who the 2019 Bears are. That will only happen, however, if the coach starts trusting the QB.

A 1-1 start to the season always seemed likely since – as was well documented throughout last week – nobody wins in Denver in Week 2. (Of course nobody predicted what actually took place down the stretch.) The demise of the team’s defense was greatly exaggerated. Reports of an offensive regression, however, don’t appear to have been aggressively predicted enough.

One of the biggest things to emerge from the win over Denver was Matt Nagy flat out not trusting his quarterback. The Bears had third downs and between two and three yards SIX times in the game and chose to run the ball on four of them. Do coaches who trust their quarterbacks take the ball out of their hands this often? I don’t think so.

It’s not uncommon for teams to run in those situations, but it is odd for them to insist on running it like the Bears did. After the game, Nagy said he intentionally had a conservative game plan in order to keep his defense rested, in the heat and high altitude. Perhaps that helped prevent the collapse until late in the fourth quarter but scoring points would’ve made any incoming collapse less significant.

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The more time the Chicago Bears have had to prepare for game day under Matt Nagy, the worse they’ve been.

Last Thursday’s loss dropped the Bears to 0-4 under Matt Nagy when they have had more than eight days to prepare for a game. That stretch dates back to last season’s opener when they fell to Packers 24-23. It also includes includes a post-bye week loss to a bad Miami team led by Brock Osweiler and a post-Thanksgiving loss to a bad New York Giants team.

The only real similarity in all of the losses was inconsistent and sloppy offensive play. While the defense let them down in all three losses last year — allowing more than 30 points twice — the offense wasn’t necessarily sharp either. “Not sharp” would be a generous assessment of last week’s performance.

Why the Bears tend to struggle in these situations is a bit of a mystery. It’s possible that Nagy over-thinks the games. That appeared to be the case Thursday when many of his scripted plays appeared to be designed to trick the defense. That worked a year ago when the Bears marched down the field on their first two possessions against the Packers. But this is a different Packers defense, with six new starters, and they didn’t fall for any of Nagy’s misdirection.

Could the Bears have benefited from preseason action? There is some evidence.. Of the five quarterbacks who didn’t throw a single pass in preseason, four struggled for at least a half. Trubisky and Rodgers were terrible. Jared Goff’s Rams got going offensively, but he struggled individually, finishing with a passer rating of just 69 in a 30-27 win over Carolina.

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It’s natural for a Chicago Bears fan 35 years old or younger to approach this season with apprehension. Because we’ve been here before.

The 2018 Bears were the surprise worst-to-first team in the NFL before making an early exit in the playoffs. And every time that has happened the Bears have gone into the next season with sky-high expectations. Almost every time, they have let down. Just this century, the Bears went into the 2002, 2007, 2011 and 2014 seasons with high expectations, but failed to make the playoffs each time.

But there are plenty of reasons to believe this team won’t take us through the same hell as those much-anticipated teams of the past. Here’s why:

The Quarterbacks

Mitch Trubisky doesn’t have to be an elite quarterback. He’s still better than Jim Miller, Rex Grossman and, possibly, Jay Cutler.

Miller went 11-2 as the Bears starter in 2001 during a 13-3 season in which they had the best defense in the league and won a series of mid-season miracles. (They were subsequently trounced by Philly in the playoffs.)

But Miller was bad. That season he completed just 57.7 percent of his passes for 13 touchdowns and 10 interceptions, averaged just 5.8 yards per attempt with a passer rating of 74.9. He was in the bottom 10 pretty much across the board statistically. The next year Miller was actually better statistically, but he was still well below league average and managed to play in just eight games before his career ended.

Perhaps the biggest mistake any Bears team has made came in 2006 when Rex remained Lovie Smith’s quarterback through thick and thin. Grossman threw touchdowns at a high rate, but completed less than 55 percent of his passes, had one of the worst interception rates in the league and was bottom ten in passer rating.

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