Plenty of quarterbacks have come and gone to Halas Hall over the years. Most of them were past their primes, injured, or just outright bad. Some have more complicated legacies, though. Erik Kramer was brilliant for one season in 1995, but couldn’t stay healthy after that. Rex Grossman reached a Super Bowl but suffered from too much inconsistency. Jay Cutler always put up numbers but never realized his massive potential due to bad luck and bad management. Then you have Mitch Trubisky. Most view him as another in a long line of draft busts. He’ll always be the guy Chicago took over Patrick Mahomes. That is his legacy, and Allen Robinson doesn’t think that is fair.
One would imagine the wide receiver has mixed feelings about his former teammate, especially after playing with more proven quarterbacks like Matthew Stafford and Jared Goff. The truth is far different. Robinson has fond memories of Trubisky. In fact, he expressed a previously untold thought he had about the quarterback to Tyler Dunne of Go Long.
Having back-to-back, 1,000-yard seasons with Mitchell in Chicago, he’s a guy that I thought we should have rolled the dice with again the year he wasn’t there my last year in Chicago. And something that I learned early in my career is a lot is based on the relationship you build with your quarterback.
Robinson feels pivoting to Justin Fields in 2021 was a mistake.
In hindsight, he is probably correct. That decision got Ryan Pace and Matt Nagy fired since the team went 6-11. Unfortunately, the head coach was done with Trubisky by that point, despite the QB playing pretty well down the stretch of the 2020 season. Robinson believes the locker room lost something when the Bears cut him loose.
People can say what they want. His career has been however it has been. That’s obviously up for interpretation, but as far as the work that he’s put in and the guy that he wanted to be and wants to be as a quarterback is something that always stood out for us. He was an easy guy to rally behind. Because again, he wasn’t a person who complained. You never heard him complaining in the meeting rooms. He would always take accountability for things. He would always try to get the guys together, whether if that was throwing in the offseason or Tuesdays at his house during the season and things like that.
So when you have a guy that’s putting in the work, that’s always trying to continuously be better, it’s easy to follow and easy to rally behind. And to be honest, very respectable. And I think that for us in Chicago especially, that’s why we had some of the teams that we had. The years that I was there with him, we didn’t have a losing season and I think a lot of it was because we were able to rally behind him.
Allen Robinson can only speak from his experience.
Trubisky, for better or worse, was 29-21 in Chicago. Nobody else has produced a winning record since he left. Fields never lived up to his vast potential. Caleb Williams is just now looking like a potential solution after an erratic rookie season, but still has only won six games. Trubisky is the only quarterback to lead the Bears to multiple playoff berths since Jim McMahon. Dunne reported a couple of years ago that the turning point for him came when former coach Brad Childress joined the staff and poisoned Nagy against the quarterback. The head coach’s relationship with Trubisky soured quickly after that. Allen Robinson can’t help but wonder how different things could’ve been if belief in Mitch never wavered.
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