The Bernstein Brief: QB Battle Out Of Bears' Control
By Dan Bernstein--
CBSChicago.com senior columnist
(CBS) The Bears so desperately wanted to manage the obvious discomfort of their quarterback situation, contorting themselves to declare this Mike Glennon's year and tamp down expectations for rookie Mitch Trubisky even as they defended their all-in push to grab him on draft night.
But as we imagined would happen, the Bears have to watch these practice games like everybody else. It won't matter to most that Glennon was bad against the Broncos' starters and Trubisky was great against the reserves: All that resonates is how it looks and what the numbers show about their respective performances.
Something is now on in a way that it hadn't yet been, and there's no undoing it.
Bears coach John Fox can say whatever he wants about depth charts, and Glennon can keep intoning his personal mantras of confidence, but these aren't closed practices or proprietary information anymore. Nobody has any idea how it will continue to play out in the next three weeks with all kinds of narrative twists to come, and it will all be televised.
Somebody is going to look like he deserves the job, and it sure appears that the kid touted as the bright future has the early advantage over the place-holding cipher. With expectations low for what will likely be a bad team, one can argue logically that there's no downside to a competition at the position that just seemed to blow wide open.
What matters now is how hard the Bears will want to work to tell us definitively that it didn't and how each next game could change their minds. What's indisputable is that some of the power the team had to control the story just slipped away from them Thursday night.
Dan Bernstein is a co-host of 670 The Score's "Bernstein and Goff Show" in afternoon drive. You can follow him on Twitter @dan_bernstein and read more of his columns here.
