These Patrick Mahomes Stories Will Never Go Away And It Makes Me Sick
Are you in the market for 4,000 words on the Bears' quarterback situation? Do you hate your life but enjoy the pain & suffering of retroactively evaluating the 2017 NFL Draft? Is there no threshold for Patrick Mahomes vs. Mitch Trubisky content in your brain? Because if so then I got some good news: Bleacher Report has you covered, IN DEPTH, for approximately the 857th fucking time since criticism on the subject became available. Rinse and repeat fellas. You know the drill:
"Deshaun was 1A and Patrick 1B," said an AFC scout. "[Trubisky] was in consideration; he just wasn't ranked with those guys. If you want to say third, then yeah, that's where he was.”
The red flags so many others saw in Trubisky were elementary quarterback criteria: his lack of experience, his intangibles. UNC coaches hadn't exactly shown great faith in Trubisky, after all.
What about Trubisky? "You just didn't get this feeling of a leader of men, a guy that just stood up and looked you in the eye. It's hard to put an actual word to it."
Looking back at the 2017 draft and considering why so many player evaluators are saying today that the Bears' mistake was obvious back then, the "It" factor is what they say Watson and Mahomes had that Trubisky did not.
At some point you imagine this story goes away and personally I hope it's sooner rather than later. It's downright exhausting when you consider that roughly 99.99% of casual sports fans are blatantly aware the Bears picked Mitch over Pat Mahomes with 100% of those same people knowing it was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad mistake. If a new chapter has to get written every time the Bears lose a game or Mitch cuts a fart then I think we can all agree there's better use of our time. Even if you're a deadbeat loser, you got better stuff going on than marinating in Ryan Pace's mistakes.
That said, I'm obviously taking this coverage extremely personally and I know I'm not alone in Chicago on this front. From a content standpoint it makes sense to continuously poke Bears fans. You can set this trap for me 100 times in a row and I'll still take the bait on the 101st time. It's an unavoidable reality that Bears/Mahomes will bring you clicks and comments at the expense of our collective health & welfare.
The worst part is that most Bears fans agree that Mitch is going to catch on somewhere else and then immediately fulfill his potential. Then the next round of stories is going to be about how the Bears failed to unlock the real Mitch. How all he needed was some new scenery and a thinner playbook to be a champion. You think I'm joking but this is what we've come to expect. Not just that it failed here, but that it's going to be so much better somewhere else. Probably the New York Jets if it we want to make this as horrifying as possible.
Elsewhere can we just shed some light on the 8 other teams that passed on Patrick Mahomes? Titans, Jags, Chargers, Browns, Niners, Jets, Panthers, Bengals. Like yeah the Bears skipped him for Mitch but is that as bad as Mariotta, Bortles, Rivers, Jimmy, Andy Dalton, Fitzmagic, Cam or Cody fucking Kessler? Why is no one talking about Kyle Shanahan getting curb stomped in the Super Bowl by the guy he could have drafted? Easy answer is that it's just so much easier to piss of Bears fans.
Never forget the Bengals took WR John Ross one pick before Mahomes. In 3+ years he's caught 51 balls for 733 yards. Cinci went 15-33 before failing to take Mahomes 9th overall, and as a result they've wasted 3 seasons before starting another rebuild. There's a great story that no one's going to tell because it's so much easier to replay the same Mitch narrative over and again.
Trust me when I say that we get it. Literally everyone should've drafted Patrick Mahomes. Blah blah blah.
Now let me live goddamnit. There's 12 games left on the schedule and I expect Mitch to dress for every single one.