Couch: Football gods use Mitch Trubisky to torture Chicago Bears fans and new QB Justin Fields

I don't mean to be a pessimist about Justin Fields, the new Chicago Bears quarterback. I consider myself a public servant by pointing out that I don't believe in him, that he hasn't done a thing to earn the crazy belief and love Chicagoans already have for him.

I'm worried about the mental health of my fellow Chicagoans. They can't stomach another failed QB.

I pointed this out last week, too, but that wasn't good enough. After the second preseason game in the Fields era Saturday, the sickness only got worse. Bears fans completely lost their minds.

The football gods are always laughing at the Bears' QB setup, trying to come up with new ways to amuse themselves. On Saturday, the gods were on their game even if Fields wasn't on his.

The appeal of Fields, who was already the No. 2 selling NFL jersey before his first preseason game, is not who he is, but who he isn't. He isn't Mitch Trubisky, Fields' predecessor as great Chicago QB nope.

After four years of Trubisky, the Bears dumped him, picked up Andy Dalton from the Dallas Cowboys, and quickly pronounced him QB1. Then Fields fell to the Bears in the draft.

Put all of that together, and here's what happened Saturday when the Buffalo Bills crushed the Bears: Dalton started, but Bears fans were chanting for Fields. Coach Matt Nagy has said that Dalton is the starter and won't be judged until he plays regular-season games.

Fans of the worst quarterback franchise in NFL history don't want to have anything to do with their starting quarterback. They just want Fields. Nagy will cave soon enough.

After Fields' first preseason game, he said he was surprised the NFL seemed slow. Was he really already OK with the speed of the league? On Saturday, he was hit so hard that he lost his helmet. He was sacked twice and couldn't get out of the way. He mixed in some effective scrambles and a perfect leading 30-yard pass to tight end Jesse James. That was enough to make Bears fans happy, even though he completed just 9 of 19 passes for 80 yards and a 59.1 passer rating.

WAKE UP, Chicago.

And the ultimate irony: Guess who was quarterbacking Buffalo to four straight touchdown drives and 28 points by the middle of the second quarter.

Yes, Trubisky. Of all people. It was the football gods spiking the ball in Bears fans' faces.

Four years ago, Trubisky, much like Fields, also had an excellent first preseason game with the Bears. He completed his first 10 passes and ended with a 103.1 passer rating. Afterward, as the Chicago Sun-Times reminded us the other day, this is what NFL analyst Mark Schlereth said:

"You can see great poise. You can see a guy who was in control. You can see a guy that – even when they had these half-field reads and they ran a lot of boot-keeps and those things – man, he understood the progression."

Four years later, you couldn't see any of those things.

After Trubisky burned the Bears Saturday, I sarcastically tweeted that I wish the Bears could get a quarterback like the guy the Bills have. Then, @indybill23 tweeted back: "I mean, they probably could, but they'd have no idea how to develop him."

That brought up a great question: Is the Bears' problem the failure to identify a QB or to develop one? I think it's more about ID'ing one, as their high draft picks have left Chicago and continued to fail. That said, they never improved in Chicago, either.

One quarterback after another has paraded through Chicago for three-quarters of a century since Sid Luckman won four NFL titles and ushered in the T-formation.

He left in 1950, though. Joe Biden was 8 at the time.

Every Bears quarterback has failed since then. You'd think Chicagoans would be well prepared for this.

Instead, they are like a homeowner in Florida hurricane country with nothing to protect their windows from being smashed in. At some point, don't you know what's coming? Shouldn't you be prepared?

So like I said, the appeal of Fields is that he's not Trubisky. Chicago loved Trubisky because he wasn't Jay Cutler. Cutler wasn't Rex Grossman, who wasn't Kordell Stewart, who wasn't Cade McNown.

It's Fields' turn now. And somehow Chicagoans are sold. It's not healthy for them. I fear that three or four years from now, the Bears will get their next QB: Not Justin Fields.