Getty Chicago Bears running back Tarik Cohen
Tarik Cohen may not know which Chicago Bears quarterback is going to win the team’s competition for the starting job, but he has an opinion about what Mitchell Trubisky has to do in order to be the guy. Cohen appeared on ESPN’s First Take Friday, and he shared his thoughts with co-hosts Stephen A. Smith and Max Kellerman about his team’s impending battle under center.
When Kellerman asked Cohen, who was drafted in the 2017 class along with Trubisky, what his thoughts were about the Bears bringing in veteran Nick Foles to either push Trubisky or take his job, the running back and All-Pro return specialist was surprisingly candid. And while he didn’t pick a favorite, he did suggest Trubisky is most effective when he doesn’t do a great deal of thinking.
Tarik Cohen on Mitch Trubisky: He’s Best When He’s Not in His Own Head
Cohen didn’t flinch when asked what he thought about the team signing Foles.
“I just look at it like Coach Nagy always tells us, competition breeds success. You know, we can’t have two quarterbacks on the field at the same time, so it’s going to be one person – someone’s going to be that guy. I feel like whoever that is, they’re going to be ready to step up to the plate and they’re going to have all the guys behind them. With Mitch, we’ve been around him for a long time. That’s my guy. Came in with him. And I see that in him – I see that he’s ready to step up to the plate and ready to battle it out for this spot. The same with Nick Foles – just hearing him talk on the Zoom meetings, and seeing him work, seeing his resume, I can see that he’s also not going to lay down and come in and sit on the bench. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens.”
When Smith spoke critically of Trubisky, saying he sees two different players when he watches the quarterback play, noting Trubisky can be “a bit reluctant, a bit hesitant at times, potentially a bit too sensitive to the criticism” around him, Cohen defended the fourth-year QB while also sharing what attitude he thinks Trubisky has to bring if he wants to beat Foles.
“I really feel like it’s a number of things with our offense. We’re young. I feel like we weren’t really clicking well, and we really didn’t help him a lot at times,” Cohen said. “But I feel like once he gets that confidence about himself – and once he gets out of his own head, and he has that ‘F-it’ mentality, I feel like that’s when we see the best of him. You see in games like the Tampa Bay game that you’re showing. In the games when he just goes out there and has fun with us, he’s a wonderful quarterback.”
You can watch Cohen’s entire interview on First Take below.
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Bears’ RB Tarik Cohen: Mitchell Trubisky Needs ‘F- It’ Mentality