Rozner: Trubiskygate fine distraction from real Bears issue

What did Matt Nagy know and when did he know it?

As Chicago dissects every word for the next six days and tries to figure out when the Bears head coach knew Mitch Trubisky was hurt - or questions if he was really hurt - Trubiskygate will be all the rage.

The problem is that the Bears have been changing the story ever since Trubisky was pulled and Chase Daniel was inserted into the game late Sunday night.

Nagy seemed to indicate Sunday night that he didn't know the QB was injured until "a few series" before he pulled him.

Trubisky said Sunday night that the hip injury occurred late in the first half and he was evaluated at halftime.

So Nagy wanted us to believe that the head coach didn't know his starting quarterback spent halftime being looked at by doctors, that he didn't know about it until the fourth quarter?

This stretches the imagination, even for a franchise that under the best of circumstances has a hard time telling the truth.

On Monday, Nagy changed his story and said he knew it happened on the sack at the end of the second quarter, and that Trubisky suffered a hip pointer.

This is a very painful injury and it truly is hard to move. So assuming this is what happened, it was probably difficult for Trubisky to manage the game in the second half, making some of Nagy's play calls look even less logical than normal.

Yeah, you remember that option play where he had to move to his left? Trubisky never approached the line of scrimmage to deceive the defender, and after the flip the play lost yardage on third-and-1.

So on Sunday night the injury appeared to take Nagy by surprise, but on Monday he said they knew about it at halftime and the staff was monitoring the quarterback throughout the second half.

"Over time, when it became more of a concern, was when I said it was a couple series," Nagy sort of explained Monday. "So I knew he had a hip deal, but it wasn't significant enough to not play (in the second half).

"Over time, the stiffness got to a point where he wasn't even able to sit on the bench."

The bench. Yeah, that's the problem here. You want to know if Trubisky was benched based on the way it looked, and because there's the question of whether Daniel warmed up.

Nagy said he did, but Daniel still had a hat on and didn't look ready to go in as Nagy was having his heart-to-heart with Trubisky on the sideline.

Deep exhale here.

From a football standpoint, none of this matters. The guess is - and it's only a guess - that Trubisky was really hurting. Hip pointers are very unpleasant.

It's likely that Nagy did know at halftime and misled everyone Sunday night, an amateur and avoidable mistake that led to conspiracy theories and all the nonsense that has followed, nonsense that will follow Trubisky's every move this week until he warms up Sunday at Soldier Field.

If he warms up Sunday.

Maybe Nagy just didn't want to explain his second-half play calls or why he left an injured quarterback in the game.

Maybe not.

Feel free to try to understand what the Bears do and why they do it - and always at your own risk.

Again, none of this gibberish is really all that important.

Nagy did know. He didn't know. Trubisky is hurt. He isn't hurt. He was benched. He wasn't benched. Daniel warmed. He didn't warm. Nagy purposely misled in his comments. Or he was just confused in the heat of a postgame news conference.

It really doesn't matter.

The question before us is about whether the Bears have an NFL quarterback. Trubisky's third NFL season is nearing an end and the franchise has decisions to make about his future after investing so much to get him.

Trubiskygate will be a fine distraction this week from the fact that the Bears are 4-6, will miss the playoffs for the 11th time in 13 years and that their starting quarterback is only marginally better today than the day he was drafted.

That should be the story all week and every week until they figure it out, and it's one that many are just starting to wake up to after being sold something very different for years.

Trubisky has made little progress in three years in the NFL and the Bears protect him publicly like he's an aging Hall of Famer who can't play anymore, but they don't want to embarrass him for fear of hurting his feelings.

It's a scary place to be in Year 5 of a rebuild.

And it matters much more than what Nagy knew and when he knew it.