Why Bears may have won Super Bowl with Deshaun Watson

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All week we’ve been subjected to “coulda, woulda, shoulda” questions as the Bears and Mitchell Trubisky get ready to face the Texans and Deshaun Watson. But instead of asking the same old “How did the Bears pass on Watson and Mahomes in 2017?” or “How much better could the Bears have been if they hadn’t paired Matt Nagy and Trubisky?” we’re taking things a step further: Could the Bears have made, and won, Super Bowl LIII with Watson under center instead of Trubisky?

Sunday Night Football’s Chris Simms doesn’t think it’s such a crazy proposition.

“It was a borderline Super Bowl team, as is, that year” Simms told NBC Sports Chicago.

If you recall, that season the Patriots dispatched the Rams pretty easily in a defensive 13-3 win. The same Rams that the Bears handled themselves, 15-6, in primetime.

The Patriots followed Vic Fangio’s blueprint to shut down Los Angeles’ zone-run scheme, and the game was never very competitive. But Jared Goff is a very different QB from Watson.

“There’s a lot of things there that would’ve given that Patriots team some issues, for sure,” Simms said. “With that Bears defense the way they played that whole year, I don’t care, Tom Brady, Rob Gronkowski, or not, they would’ve given that Patriots offense a tough time. The way that offense played that year, with Watson, yeah, I don’t think you’re crazy to say that.”

The biggest difference that Simms would expect from adding Watson that season would simply be more consistency. That goes a long way.

“We would’ve hit a lot less lulls in the offense— those valleys that we’ve seen for weeks in a row, where we go, ‘What’s the Bears’ offense? What are they going to do?’ That’s what great quarterbacks like Deshaun Watson and Patrick Mahomes can do. They can cover the flaws of your football team.”

Covering flaws like an inconsistent kicker perchance??? It’s true that Trubisky made some huge plays at the end of 2018’s Wild Card loss to the Eagles. He put the Bears in a position to win, twice. But for three quarters, the Bears couldn’t find any rhythm on offense. Before the fourth quarter, the Bears had only scored six points against a defense that surrendered over 21 points per game in the regular season. With Watson leading the team, maybe the game wouldn’t have come down to a last-second field goal?

We can torture ourselves with these kinds of questions ad nauseam, but at the end of the day we’ll never know. Instead we’ll have to settle for a glimpse of what could have been on Sunday.

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