Hall of Fame coach Tony Dungy can’t figure out why Bears coach John Fox is starting Mike Glennon over Mitchell Trubisky.
Dungy said on PFT Live that he has had his eye on Trubisky since the summer, thinks Trubisky looks ready to play, and can’t figure out why the Bears have gone with Glennon instead.
“What I saw in training camp, and what I saw in the preseason games, I don’t understand why Trubisky is not playing now,” Dungy said.
Dungy said that when you’re a last-place team that traded up in the draft to take a quarterback, you should want to see what that quarterback can do.
“You won three games last year,” Dungy said. “You mortgaged the future to take this guy. Put him in and let him get the experience. Now, if he struggles and you’ve got to go to Mike Glennon to bail him out, that’s fine. But he didn’t look like he was struggling, to me, in training camp.”
In Indianapolis Dungy inherited a Hall of Fame quarterback in Peyton Manning, but in Dungy’s previous head coaching job, in Tampa Bay, he inherited a struggling young quarterback who had been a Top 10 pick -- and Dungy said the whole Buccaneers franchise understood that the only way to figure out what it had in that quarterback was to give him experience.
“When you draft Mitchell Trubisky, you have to make an organizational decision,” Dungy said. “When I came to Tampa in 1996 they had drafted Trent Dilfer with the sixth pick in the draft. We sat down, Rich McKay and I and the ownership, and we said, ‘We’re going to play Trent Dilfer for two years. I don’t care if we don’t win a game, I don’t care if we go to the Super Bowl. He’s going to play, because we have to find out if he justifies this sixth pick. Is he our guy?’ And we were all on board with that. And that’s what it’s got to be. This organization made a decision, somehow, not to start Mitchell Trubisky no matter what happens in training camp or the preseason, Glennon was going to start. I think the organization has to change.”
Fox sounded open to making a change after Thursday’s game. That change appears overdue.