Be You: Bears’ Matt Nagy and Mitch Trubisky are being themselves, and that’s the problem

Be You.

That’s Matt Nagy’s ongoing appeal to his players. If you can just be yourself, trust your ability and let your personality shine through, he says, it will be more than enough to succeed.

Unfortunately, Being You is exactly the 2019 Bears’ problem. They are who they are, and it’s not nearly good enough. I wish the team’s official slogan were Be Someone Else, Please.

I wish Nagy were 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan.

I wish Mitch Trubisky were Patrick Mahomes … Deshaun Watson … Teddy Bridgewater.

Nagy and Trubisky are two of the franchise’s bigger problems, and both need to be addressed in some fashion in the offseason, but is anyone in charge listening? A loss to Green Bay on Sunday knocked the 7-7 Bears out of the playoff hunt a season after they won the NFC North with a 12-4 record. Hard for general manager Ryan Pace to hear the air-raid sirens with a finger in each ear.

Trubisky shows the same tendencies now that he did in his first two years in the league. He too often throws passes to no one in particular, and every now and then he dazzles. For all the people asking for patience in a 25-year-old quarterback: Aren’t 39 career starts enough to offer a pretty good picture of what he is? The steep regression from last season —that’s not enough to tell you the NFL is on to this guy?

What we saw against the Packers is what we’ve seen over and over again from him. He’s very good at hitting wide-open receivers over the middle when opponents with a lead want to avoid giving up deep completions. Trubisky threw for 334 yards but averaged only 6.3 yards per attempt, his season average. He can throw 53 passes, as he did against Green Bay, or he can throw 25 passes, and he still gets you to that 6.3 average.

Some of it falls on Nagy, who has had his own steep regression. The trick plays of the magical 2018 season have stayed stuffed in his pocket this year, and, without them, he has looked very ordinary. It took most of the season before Trubisky started running the ball, a skill that had made him dangerous last year. Has Mitch’s failure to run been an injury issue or a stubborn-coach issue?

Nagy will drive you crazy, if you let him. On a third-and-four near midfield in the first quarter, Nagy called a play for rookie David Montgomery, who was stopped for a one-yard loss. This is the same coach who had been allergic to the running game most of the season. And this is when he decides to run the ball? On third-and-four?

All of his bent roads eventually lead back to the passing game. Fifty-three passes by a so-so quarterback. You just shake your head. You thought Nagy was flying his freak flag with all the gimmick plays last season? Turns out, that was tame compared with the nuttiness he has displayed this season.

On the public-relations front this season, he moved the goalposts when we weren’t looking. After the Bears’ painful loss in the playoffs last season, they went into 2019 with Super Bowl aspirations. Nagy didn’t do anything to douse the raging optimism, nor should he have. But when his team started falling apart in the middle of the season, he began publicly lauding his players for sticking together when, he said, they could have started pointing fingers. After the loss in Green Bay, he said he was proud of his team for playing hard.

That’s quite a consolation prize.

Nagy will be the Bears’ coach next season, and Trubisky will be the starting quarterback. Pace will point to the good things Trubisky did against weak opponents this season as reason to stick with him. Nagy will continue to back Trubisky because that’s what everyone at Halas Hall has been conditioned to do.

Run when you should pass, pass when you should run and compliment Mitch at every turn. Oh, and watch the McCaskeys continue to celebrate the hell out of the team’s 100th anniversary while the current team glub-glubs to the bottom of the sea. Those are your 2019 Chicago Bears.

They play the 10-4 Chiefs on Sunday night, and you know what that means: wall-to-wall media analysis of the upcoming Trubisky-Mahomes “duel’’ and 10,000 more questions about why Pace chose to move up a spot to take Trubisky second overall in the 2017 draft. The general manager will be unavailable for comment.

He can’t help himself. He’s just Being Him.