Bears fans, however, have never been known to go quietly into the night or really go quietly anywhere. They have gathered their swords and sprung to their quarterback's defense with arguments ranging from tinfoil hattery ("they are biased against Mitch!") to more well thought-out critiques of PFF and their grading methods. You wouldn't be reading this site (if you're reading it at all, which you probably aren't. It appears taking a break of a mere *checks notes* four years did some damage to my overall readership) if you weren't looking for more of the latter, so here goes nothing: Pro Football Focus grade of Mitch isn't wrong, nor does it reflect any kind of bias on their part. It's also pretty much irrelevant.
Imagine, if you will, that a football season is a 16 week college course. Each week there is a test, worth exactly 6.25% of your grade. You need a 70% overall to pass the course, but in the first three weeks of the season your drunk ass failed to show up to class and you got a zero. Week 4 starts and you've already completely wasted 18.75% of the available points. You've basically got to be perfect in every single week from then on in order to ensure a passing grade. You do your best, but there are some weeks you get an A and then there are some weeks you get Cs. Those last 13 weeks of the year you average out to being more or less a B student. You get 80% of the remaining points overall, but at the end of the year, thanks to those three zeros in the first three classes, you get a 65 in the course. You're a failure, your dad's mad he spent a dime sending you to school, and pretty much anybody looking at your semester from a distance would deem it a failure.
And yet...you did improve, didn't you? You were a B student for a greater % of the weeks you were in class than you were an F student. You learned a lot, you actually understood the point of the class, but alas, the transcript never lies, does it? If you were to take the class next fall, though, and you managed perfect attendance, would it be wise for someone to bet that you'll fail it again?
The above scenario is more or less what happened to Mitch Trubisky and his PFF grade in 2018. Most Bears fans would hardly disagree, if they were being honest, that Mitch was about as bad as bad gets in the first three games of the season. He was panicky, he rushed throws, he took unnecessary sacks, he looked lost after his first read, he overthrew open receivers, he had a number of dumb turnovers and almost-turnovers. No one should dispute the three straight Fs, more or less, that PFF assigned Mitch for almost the entire first chunk of the season.
The season didn't end in week three, though. As we all know, in week four, Mitch lit up the Buccaneers for 354 yards and 6 TDs. From that point through the end of the season Mitch completed 65.8% of his passes at 8.0 yards per attempt with a 22-9 TD:INT ratio and a 101.0 passer rating while taking just 15 sacks and rushing for 357 yards. Even in today's passing environment those are outstanding numbers. And while he certainly mixed in some clunkers during that stretch, by and large almost any rational being would conclude he improved vastly from the deer-in-the-headlights of those first three games as his comfort with the league, his team, and his scheme grew. Even PFF agrees, actually, as Mitch's second half grade of 72.8 was in the top half of the league and would have been about league average if it had been his full season grade. Surely if that had been the case we'd see far less fussing over this discrepancy between an "average" PFF grade and above-average actual numbers.
PFF, however, isn't here to form a narrative about Mitch's growth, or to look for signs of improvement. They are here to analyze the data at hand, and in doing so those three festering dumps Mitch took to start the year are going to factor heavily. Take a completely bottom-of-the-barrel start to the season and add an average run the rest of the schedule and the overall grade you come up with is going to be below average, that's just how math and grades work. PFF naturally prides itself on their grades and their analysis is there not to make excuses or to contextualize why and how Mitch did what and when. That is their right.
Bears fans, however, also have just as much of a right to make those arguments. Sure, most QBs who put up an overall grade like Mitch's are bad QBs who will likely continue to be bad. On the other hand, some are DeShaun Watson, who finished 28th in PFF's grades in 2017 despite great conventional stats largely, like Mitch, due to "turnover worthy plays," a key factor in the PFF rubric. DeShaun hardly seemed phased however, because it turns out his great conventional stats were more predictive of what he was going to do in the future than his PFF grade. I suspect where one does find exceptions to the rule when it comes to players with bad PFF grades who go on to success in future years, those exceptions are more likely to be players who put up great conventional numbers and perhaps made the occasionally galling youthful "turnover-worthy play." Those plays tend to disappear with experience, but completion % and a proclivity for throwing TDs at a higher than average rate do not.
PFF can claim that their stats and grades are pretty stable and predictive from year to year, but any model will have exceptions, and surely no better case for an exception can be found than a QB who ranked above average in most of the important categories and yet, in his first year in a complex offense, made the occasional baffling overthrow or mind-numbing turnover. What I know is that only 17 second year QBs since 1983 have thrown at least 200 passes and been at least 5% better than league average in terms of completion %, adjusted net yards per attempt, and TD%. Three were HOFers or soon will be (Dan Marino, Kurt Warner, Peyton Manning), others were elite QBs nonethless (Carson Palmer, Boomer Esiason, Ben Roethlisberger), and some were merely pretty good QBs for a time. I would think, given that the sample of QBs who have done this in the last 35 years is so small, those markers are pretty hard for a QB to manage if he's a "fluke," as Mitch's raw PFF grade and critics would seem to suggest. Those, too, seem like numbers that are pretty predictive. We will see whose numbers are correct.
In the end, the debate between Bears fans and PFF-devotees isn't going to end until we have another season of data, at least, and even then it may not, since, god-willing, the Bears will yet again field such a superlative offensive line and skill position group in such a great scheme that critics will have no trouble attributing any success Mitch has to those factors and his failures to him alone. We may be destined to do this forever. My only suggestion is to put the debate regarding Mitch's 2018 grade in the dustbin where it belongs. The grade is what it is, and there are justifiable reasons for it. The story does not end with the grade, however, and Bears fans are equally justified in insisting on judging it in context, and countering with a narrative of progress and improvement. The new debate is who Mitch Trubisky will be in 2019 and beyond, and how that 2018 grade helps us guess. Ultimately this is a question of whether or not you believe in a grade set in stone, judging a fixed point in time, or if you believe the true story is one of growth. There are certainly numbers to support both sides, and whatever the Goddamn Detroit Lions Fans will have you believe, this is not a question that can be answered by a deference to the authority of a single stat or number. You're going to have to watch and make up your mind for yourself.
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