Looking back at Mitchell Trubisky’s career with the Chicago Bears

After a maligned four-year stint with the Chicago Bears, Mitchell Trubisky is now a member of the Buffalo Bills. Unlike on his old team, Trubisky will be playing a secondary role in Buffalo, backing up the far more successful Josh Allen. The question is, how much value can Trubisky provide to his new offense?

Mitchell Trubisky’s tenure with the Bears was unspectacular

Through no fault of his own, Trubisky will forever be remembered as the quarterback drafted above Deshaun Watson and Patrick Mahomes. Even if Trubisky became a top-10 quarterback, it would be difficult to shake that stain.

Unfortunately, Trubisky has been far from that level through most of his career, as you can see in the chart below.

Trubisky’s rookie year wasn’t particularly encouraging, as is often the case with players during their first NFL seasons.

However, despite his early struggles, Trubisky had a solid Year 2. He recorded decent statistics, and, arguably more importantly, Chicago won 11 of the 14 games he started.

Yet, Trubisky seemed to regress in the next two seasons. Ultimately, he was benched for Nick Foles during his final year with the Bears.

Statistically speaking, Trubisky was never terrible after his first year. Still, his generally underwhelming performance led Chicago to allow him to walk during the offseason and trade up to select Justin Fields in the 2021 NFL Draft.

It’s difficult to argue with that decision because a starting quarterback needs to be far better than mediocre. Nevertheless, the advanced metrics show that Trubisky can still provide value as a backup.

Advanced metrics match the box scores

If we want the complete picture of Trubisky’s time with the Bears, we need to examine his advanced metrics along with his traditional ones. For starters, let’s look at the Offensive Value Metric (OVM).

The OVM is a grading system created by the (Bx) Movement to evaluate players based on their influence on the statistics they produced rather than the statistics themselves.

For the most part, there was a strong correlation between Trubisky’s box scores and his OVM grades.

His rookie season was terrible, earning him a regular-season grade of just 19.12. That was the ninth-lowest grade among all qualifying quarterbacks.

However, during his Pro Bowl 2018 campaign, Trubisky’s grade increased dramatically, rising to 26.83. That ranked seventh in the NFL, making him one of the league’s most effective signal-callers.

Sadly, Trubisky couldn’t maintain that level of play during the following two seasons, receiving a grade of 22.14 in 2019 and 24.54 in 2020.

Still, those grades ranked 18th and 20th in their respective seasons. Ideally, you want better from your starting quarterback, but those are solid rankings for a backup.

Examining Mitchell Trubisky’s weekly performances throughout his Bears career

If we want to fully grasp how Trubisky’s level of play has changed throughout his career, we need to examine how he has performed on a weekly basis.

The charts below show Trubisky’s grades from each week of the last four seasons, marked by the black dots. For comparison, the yellow lines represent the league average regular-season grades for quarterbacks from each of those years.

As you can see, Trubisky had a rough start, with most of his grades coming in below the league average, including one of just 2.14 in Week 8.

Yet, he has become more consistent as his career has progressed, with a majority of his grades over the last three seasons ranking above average.

Exploring the advanced metrics behind the grades

If we want to understand the fluctuations in Trubisky’s OVM grades, we need to examine the advanced metrics involved.

In Trubisky’s case, most of his advanced metrics have stayed the same throughout his career. The one area that saw substantial variation was his completion statistics, which you can see in the chart below.

During his rookie season, Trubisky struggled to complete passes. Not only was his completion percentage relatively low, but the NFL’s projections also suggest that it was 5.6% lower than it should have been.

Both those statistics flipped dramatically the following year. Trubisky’s completion percentage rose by more than 7%, and he also completed 1.7% more of his passes than he should have.

And while both of those numbers fluctuated in the next two seasons, corresponding to the changes in his OVM grades, they never reverted to what he showed as a rookie.

Trubisky can be an elite backup

Trubisky often earned more criticism than he truly deserved. At times, the more hyperbolic fans would suggest that he has nothing to offer as a quarterback at the NFL level. In reality, outside of his rookie year, Trubisky was decidedly average and sometimes even better than that.

Of course, it is difficult (though not impossible) for an NFL team to find consistent success with a starting quarterback of that caliber.

But while Trubisky probably won’t ever be the franchise quarterback he was drafted to be, what he can be is an elite backup. Recent NFL seasons have proven that having a capable backup at the league’s most important position is crucial.

For a Bills franchise looking to make a Super Bowl run in 2021, Trubisky can provide the security they need should a worst-case scenario occur and Josh Allen is forced to the sidelines.