After spending the beginning of his rookie season stuck behind Mike Glennon on the depth chart and the second stage of his rookie season stuck in John Fox's bland offense, second-year Bears quarterback Mitchell Trubisky has finally been freed by new coach Matt Nagy.

Just ask Bears guard Kyle Long. On Thursday, Long told Madeline Kenney of the Chicago Sun-Times that the Bears have "taken the training wheels" off Trubisky.

Long also told SiriusXM NFL Radio that Trubisky "makes everything look easy."

Expectations for the Bears haven't been this high since the start of the Jay Cutler-Lovie Smith era, which never lived up to the hype. The reason the Bears are finally entering a season with expectations again is because they're finally beginning to resemble a playoff-caliber team, with an already solid defense that just added Roquan Smith and an offense that suddenly features weapons like Allen Robinson, Taylor Gabriel, Trey Burton, Adam Shaheen, Jordan Howard, and Tarik Cohen. 

But let's stick with the quarterback and coach for now, because those two will likely end up deciding the Bears' fate. Trubisky's rookie-year tape featured plenty of promise -- he's an athletic quarterback with good arm talent and real precision on his passes -- but there's no doubt he was hindered by the Bears' unimaginative offense. Howard already called last year's offense "basic."

It went beyond basic. At times, it appeared to be actively working against Trubisky's strengths coming out of North Carolina. 

And that's why the Bears fired Fox and replaced him with Nagy, who comes from Kansas City, where he served as the Chiefs' offensive coordinator under Andy Reid. Nagy just helped turn Alex Smith into the league's highest-rated passer and the league's best deep-ball thrower this past season. His next task is to help Trubisky make the leap from promising to good. He can do that by making Trubisky's job easier, similar to how Sean McVay helped Jared Goff this past season.

The fun part about the upcoming season is that we have no idea what the Bears' offense will look like, but chances are it'll feature modern concepts like ... shotgun-based formations. On his part, Nagy has said that it will look similar to the Chiefs' offense.

"It will be different in some regards, which is only fair to our coaches on offense and the ideas they have," Nagy said in June, per The Athletic. "But the identity is going to be the same. It will feel very similar to Kansas City's. We're in the lab now. That's the fun part. All the coaches are giving their ideas and thoughts. Coach [Andy Reid] always said he had 51 percent of the say. So ultimately, he had final say. Now I have that. There are plays I liked that Coach [Reid] didn't like, so now those plays are in."

But don't be surprised if it also looks like the Eagles' offense. 

Expecting Nagy to do what McVay did to the Rams last year is probably expecting too much, but the mere fact that comparisons between the Bears and Rams have already been made signals just how much has changed in Chicago. Will the Bears surpass the Vikings and the Packers in the NFC North? Probably not. But will the Bears finally provide an exciting, watchable product for their fans? Probably.

And that alone is enough -- for now, at least.