Rozner: Now comes the hard part for Bears

On Tuesday you will hear a story.

It will be told through the eyes of Bears management, which holds an annual postseason spin session, during which they sound entirely unable to evaluate their own players.

Or they are merely pretending to see something that no one else sees.

It is always fascinating to watch the plan unfold before the media, a sales job that has no shame.

Watch for them to tell you that Mitch Trubisky now has the equivalent experience of a four-year college starter, which is why you need to be patient, as if they had no idea they were drafting a player with 13 career NCAA starts.

Who could have known such a thing before they traded picks and moved up one spot to take Trubisky at No. 2 in 2017?

If only this information had been available at the time.

What remains incontrovertible is that GM Ryan Pace has produced one playoff game in five years, a record matched only by the worst franchises in the NFL.

Only three teams out of 32 have played no playoff games in the last five years: Cleveland, Tampa and the Jets.

Seven teams have played a single playoff game the last five years: the Bears, Giants, Oakland, Detroit, Cincinnati, Miami and Washington.

San Francisco also had none the last four years, but is guaranteed one playoff game this year and has a chance to go deep, so we left them off the list.

All those other teams mentioned are considered laughingstocks around the NFL and this is some miserable company to keep.

So how is it that the Bears escape as something special, not worthy of the same scrutiny or punchline as, say, the Browns and Bengals?

"I feel like we're close," Trubisky said Sunday. "We have the pieces. We just need to put it all together. It's just about consistency."

Pace's record is 34-46 after Sunday's stirring 21-19 victory over the Vikings' second string in Minnesota.

Pace managed 6-10 in his first year and five years later the Bears are 8-8, including Sunday's gift.

Their only wins this year against a playoff team were the two against the Vikings. That includes Chase Daniel's September win over Minnesota and Sunday's thriller.

If you were to examine each game and find the good QB play, you would find a few quarters and the occasional 30 minutes, but Matt Nagy has used the word "great" so often that you were probably expecting Trubisky to show up on that list of the NFL's greatest ever, somewhere between Tom Brady and Johnny Unitas.

Nagy can cherry-pick parts of any game to make Trubisky look better, and you can do the same to make him look worse.

They can blame this person or that injury or that play call or whatever excuse available, but a reasonable glance tells you that Trubisky ends his third season looking like a guy trying to figure it out in his first NFL game.

The offense, which wasn't great last year, took a step back as Trubisky looked lost and Nagy equally inept.

Nagy can't fix the quarterback unless they go to a run-heavy scheme that admits Trubisky is a game manager and nothing else, and Pace shouldn't pretend otherwise, though that won't stop both from insisting your eyes require glasses.

You see a backup QB and they see Hall of Famer.

It's what they do best.

Pace is particularly good at avoiding reality, but he apparently has a job for life, so no need to sweat it.

It doesn't take six years to build an NFL team anymore, given the parity and awful play, where just a few playmakers on each side of the ball give you a chance to win it all.

But Pace will go into Year 6 with many unknowns, as the rebuild goes on and on and on.

"There's a lot of stuff for us to look at," Nagy said Sunday. "It's not one thing."

In that lone regard, Nagy won't get an argument from anyone outside of Halas Hall.