Bears Attempt to Harness Mitchell Trubisky's Running Ability
The Bears hope to unharness Mitchell Trubisky's legs while harnessing his left shoulder.
If Trubisky plays, he will wear a harness on his left shoulder Sunday against the New Orleans Saints as the Bears hope it helps their starting quarterback return from injury at the level he left off against the Washington Redskins.
The Bears are delaying a final decision on Trubisky's playing status until late in the week, although it appears a formality to be decided by whether he can withstand any pain left over from the hit he took Sept. 29 against Minnesota.
"I think I've just gotta show the training staff and the coaches that my shoulder and everything is strong enough to be able to put me out there, to withstand hits, to be able to do my job to 100 percent," Trubisky said. "If I can show them throughout practice this week that I'm good to go and I feel comfortable about where I'm at because obviously you don't want to go out there if you don't feel like you can do your job or if it's impacting you in some type of way and holding you back."
Trubisky's shoulder was popped back into place by team medical personnel when he injured it against Minnesota and he said now it doesn't hurt when he throws.
The question the Bears must answer is whether they can even simulate the kinds of hits on his shoulder he'll take against the Saints' aggressive defensive front to find out if he can take a hit.
"Obviously I haven't gotten hit since then and there always is some pain tolerance involved, I mean this is football," Trubisky said Wednesday. "So you've just got to figure out throughout the course of the week, I guess?
"There is some ways we simulate getting hit either with the pads or going through certain drills with the trainers to try to get you as ready as possible and to make sure I can go out and do the job the way I know I can."
Trubisky doesn't think the harness limits his throwing motion, and teammate Anthony Miller offered him some advice on wearing it because he had a shoulder injury requiring surgery and wore one.
"I just told him to play like he normally does," Miller said.
Then again, Miller isn't exactly a ringing endorsement for the harness.
"He actually cut his off last game in the middle of the game because he said it was restricting him," Trubisky said. "Mine's a little different because I don't need to necessarily catch. But I've got to make sure I'll be able to catch all the (shotgun) snap radiuses if something happens with that.
"I've been practicing everything that you could pretty much simulate with the trainers as much as you can to make sure I could go out there and do what my team needs me to do."
Coach Matt Nagy called himself "cautiously optimistic" Trubisky will start and Chase Daniel can go back to being the backup.
"I feel good about it but we're preparing with both right now," Nagy said. "The thing with Chase is that we know he's been in this (emergency) role before. If it ends up being him, then it's the same mojo."
What is certain is they can't have Trubisky return at the level he played at in the season opener against Green Bay. He has to be near where he left off against Washington before getting hurt right at the start of the Vikings game."
"We're at a point where it's time to go out there and play and execute and just be together, all of us," Nagy said. "I know he's the focal point, and so am I."
Trubisky completed 25 of 31 for 231 yards and three touchdowns with one interception against Washington's porous defense. The 116.5 passer rating that night was well beyond his 62.1 in the opening-night loss against Green Bay or 70.0 in the win over Denver.
"No. 1, from the first game for all of us, not just him, that's about as low as it gets," Nagy said. "So it wasn’t hard to be a little better the next game. But I felt that each game leading up to that Vikings game until he got hurt, that there was (improvement). Progression-wise, where he's going, playing faster, seeing at the line of scrimmage that he's getting into checks or seeing progressions, adjustments at the line of scrimmage – way quicker than what he was, not even the beginning of this year but last year. And that's how we judge that."
Trubisky saw the need for the offense to gain the consistency it had against Washington.
"We had some drives where we were good on second and third down, but we were so bad on first down that we put ourselves in a hard position to really convert and keep going," Trubisky said. "I always tell the guys the first first down is usually the toughest for us.
"So once we get that, we kind of get rolling. We gain some confidence from that and we get going."
It's easier to extend drives if your quarterback can run out of trouble, and Trubisky had excelled at this last year.
This year, though, he has five rushes for 21 yards. It's tough to see how he'll run better wearing a harness to protect an injury.
Nagy won't restrict Trubisky from running and wants those runs to come naturally.
"If it's going to get us a first down, and he's not going to get hit, run all the time. I don't care," Nagy said. That's good. That means we're moving the football.
"But be a thrower first, be a passer, be a quarterback and then if your legs come into play that's the next part of playing that position that some other people don't have."
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