A lot has happened to Allen Robinson over the past five seasons. He was one of the NFL’s best in 2019 and 2020 for the Chicago Bears. Then, he seemed to fall off a cliff in 2021. That prompted the Bears to let him walk two years ago. Since then, he landed with the Rams and Steelers but somehow played even worse. It is hard to understand how the former Pro Bowler regressed so much in such a short time. Perhaps he still isn’t over the trauma he experienced during that extended run in Chicago.
There is no question the wide receiver had a front-row seat for the demolition of what was a good team. In fact, Robinson expressed to Tyler Dunne of Go Long that he still has painful memories of what happened to the 2018 team. He feels it was more than good enough to win a championship. Sadly, the Double Doink disaster against Philadelphia, combined with a growing rift between head coach Matt Nagy and quarterback Mitch Trubisky, led to its implosion. He still has regrets about not doing more to prevent it.
The lasting memory of Jan. 6, 2019 isn’t a sight… it’s a sound. It’s the double-doink of Cody Parkey’s 43-yard field goal attempt ricocheting off the left upright and crossbar. Game over…
…“That,” Robinson laments, “was a Super Bowl-caliber team.”…
…“If I went to Nagy and was like, ‘This can be figured out and things are straight and improving,’” Robinson says, “I think it’s a totally different outcome. He needed to hear the confidence from somebody that he also believed in. And me and Nagy had a great relationship. If I have told him that? Everything could have been different.
“I think we started to get off that train. When I say ‘we,’ I mean the entire organization, I think we got off that train too quickly.”
Unfortunately, the Bears didn’t have the necessary leadership for that. Nagy proved far too immature and inexperienced to handle the lows of a catastrophic playoff loss. He let others get in his ear about Trubisky being the problem, leading to multiple benchings and wild swings at quarterback trying to fix something that hadn’t really been broken. Combine that with Ryan Pace’s mismanagement of team resources and it shouldn’t be a surprise things fell apart as fast as they did.
The simple answer is everybody panicked after that loss to Philadelphia. Fingers began being pointed, locker room morale started dipping, and once that starts, it’s almost impossible to stop. Allen Robinson would’ve known that had he arrived one year later than he did. He was with the 2017 Jacksonville Jaguars when they reached the AFC championship. They, too, collapsed the next season and were never the same. By then, Robinson was gone. What is the saying?
The only way for evil to triumph is if good men do nothing. Robinson seems to have realized this over the past few years.
