In one week, huge expectations have given way to alarm with the Bears and Mitch Trubisky

How’s that 100^th season celebration going, Bears fans? I’m guessing that the brutal loss to the Packers in the opener knocked the nostalgia right out of you and that, given the choice between attending a Galloping Ghost retrospective or watching a Throwing Trubisky revival, you’d say, “And Red Grange is supposed to enhance my life how?”

No offense to all the great players the Bears have had in their long history, but we have a situation here, people. One game into the season and the team with the Super Bowl aspirations already has been knocked a few degrees off its axis. If that sounds reactionary, well, it’s hard to be cheery after such an ugly loss. A farmer doesn’t lose a limb in a corn harvester accident and immediately declare that the misfortune will allow him to pursue his secret dream of being an opera singer. Life doesn’t work that way. There has to be regret, grief, fear and rehab. And singing lessons.

What we have here, then, is a shift. The massive buildup to the Bears’ opening game of the season has been replaced by large amounts of consternation over the Green Bay defeat. Anticipation has been replaced by alarm.

Mitch Trubisky needs to rebound Sunday against the Broncos. It really is as simple and as difficult as that. The Bears spent part of the week pointing out all the different people who had let their quarterback down against the Packers and all the different ways they had done it. That was very nice of the Bears. But the truth is that his 62.1 passer rating in the opener was a gift from the Packers, who should have had three interceptions instead of just the one Adrian Amos caught in the end zone late in the game.

If Trubisky has another game like that, even if the Bears beat a very average Denver team, the concern level will be ratcheted up even more. And I’m not convinced that the Bears, even with their extremely talented defense, can overcome a blah or bad game by their quarterback. Lots of experts are predicting that the Bears can’t replicate last season’s thievery, when they intercepted 27 passes, recovered nine fumbles and scored six touchdowns off turnovers. If that’s true, it puts more pressure on Trubisky and head coach Matt Nagy to produce more points offensively. The Bears’ defense is quite aware it didn’t force a turnover in Week 1 against Green Bay.

Nagy had a decision to make during the week: Devise a safe game plan with a good chance of improving Trubisky’s confidence or one that takes full advantage of the Broncos’ defensive weaknesses, though with more risk. When Trubisky started struggling against the Packers, Nagy suddenly buttoned up the offense like a Puritan gown. The result was an array of short passes. The Bears spend a lot of time protecting their quarterback, in all sorts of different ways. He’s in his third season in the NFL. Might want to stop doing that, coach.

Feel free to say that fans and media have put undue pressure on Trubisky. But the Bears were the ones who put all their eggs in Trubisky’s basket. When they traded up a spot to take him with the second overall pick in the 2017 draft, they announced to the world that everything they would do from that point on would be with their quarterback in mind. Now that’s pressure.

The best way for Trubisky to stop the Patrick Mahomes comparison game that fans and media are playing on a weekly basis is for him to do something about it Sunday. And it would be nice to see Trubisky having as much fun as Mahomes does on a football field with the Chiefs. That will involve a lot of yards and a few touchdowns. Is it doable against Vic Fangio’s Denver defense? Yes. Will it happen? It’s the unknowing that makes this so agonizingly interesting.

The NFL is a what-have-you-done-for-me-this-week enterprise, and woe to the team that doesn’t do anything for you on a given Sunday. That’s how a game in Week 2 can feel so big. The Bears did nothing for a fan base that had spent the offseason fantasizing about a trip to the Super Bowl. Hence the sudden jerk of the steering wheel onto a path of overreaction.

While we wait for the game to begin, would you like to hear about the time in 1939 when George Halas found $20 in an old pair of pants? I didn’t think so.