Welcome to Bears life, Caleb Williams, where the drama never stops
The Bears are in crisis yet again, and while that might be new to rookie quarterback Caleb Williams, it’s business as usual for the franchise.The experience tends to be a lot more like this than the months that led up to the season. Less surging, more spiraling. Less exhilaration, more exasperation. Less Hard Knocks, more hard knocks. It hasn’t always been that way, just for the last four decades.Welcome to the Bears, Caleb. See if you can save them.That’s been the underlying pressure since the day they drafted him No. 1 overall. The blueprint for this season was to stack enough talent on both sides of the ball to give Williams margin as he developed, but the real ask — the one that will decide their future — is for him to vault them out of this seemingly constant cycle of calamities.There’s no doubt Williams feels that, and it was evident Wednesday. As coach Matt Eberflus pleaded with reporters and everyone else to move on from the debacle against the Commanders, in which egregious coaching errors and cornerback Tyrique Stevenson inexcusably checking out contributed to his team losing on a Hail Mary, Williams took the high road.He smirked at the word “drama” when asked for his thoughts on the Bears’ current ordeal, in which several veterans have publicly voiced objection to coaching decisions, then did something Eberflus could learn from: He pointed straight at himself.“There's obviously a sense of accountability that I have to take,” Williams said. “Didn't play well in the first half. We had stalled drives and [we weren’t] finding ways to put ourselves in position to be able to score.“If we keep putting points on the board, if I keep doing my job to the best of my ability, finding ways to get points, protect the football, we [will] win a lot of games — especially with the defense that we have.”That’s genuine responsibility, not the surface-level comments like, “That starts with me,” followed by zero specifics that Eberflus and other coaches use.Williams’ miserable first half really stuck with him, as it should have. He completed just 3 of 8 passes for 33 yards, cost the Bears points shortly before halftime by taking a sack that took them out of field-goal range and failed to breach the red zone.He still wasn’t good through the early part of the fourth quarter, when he had completed 27% of his passes and had a 39.6 passer rating. No amount of dominant defense and good fortune is going to compensate for that, and at no point did Williams try to manufacture an excuse for it or claim it wasn’t as bad as it looked.But then he and the offense snapped, as he put it, and he closed the game completing 6 of 9 passes for 96 yards while leading them to a near-touchdown before the fateful Doug Kramer play and an actual touchdown and two-point conversion with 25 seconds left to rally the Bears from a 12-0 deficit to a 15-12 lead.Being a rookie starting quarterback in the NFL is grueling work that takes a stomach of steel, and Williams endured it for more than 59 minutes to finally wrest control of the game.Only to watch his coach and teammates let it slip away.“Right in that moment, you're angry,” Williams said. “You're furious that you just lost and you lost that way.”It’d be fascinating to know everything that’s going through Williams’ mind this week, especially considering he had concerns about the Bears’ haphazard history before they drafted him.Does he think this is crazy? Does he realize self-inflicted storms are the norm? Does he worry the next one is right around the corner?“Putting everything on a Hail Mary, and everything’s exploding on the outside... We have to control everything in the interior in here and we’ve got to focus on winning this game that we have now,” Williams said. “We had our 24-hour period to feel how we felt, but we’ve got to move on.”Many have tried.Eberflus hasn’t been able to escape his epic fourth-quarter meltdowns, off-field snafus and the ensuing exacerbation at the microphone as he tried to defend and explain them. Each new fiasco brings those back to the forefront, and to this point, those have defined his tenure.Keeping digging through the Halas Hall archives and there are plenty more examples with Matt Nagy, Marc Trestman and others, invariably followed by cleaning house and clunky restarts.This time, oddly, the Bears still have a winning record at 4-3 as they try to emerge from the mess. But it sure feels like reality is about blindside them. They have two more games against bad or mid-level opponents — the Cardinals on Sunday, then a home game against the Patriots — before the schedule gets significantly tougher.Very little about their path to this point suggests they’re going to stay afloat once they run up against the Packers, Vikings, Lions and others awaiting them down the stretch. And it’s implausible to think Williams can cover for all the flaws we’ve seen so far when he’s still trying to find his footing.
The Bears are in crisis yet again, and while that might be new to rookie quarterback Caleb Williams, it’s business as usual for the franchise.
The experience tends to be a lot more like this than the months that led up to the season. Less surging, more spiraling. Less exhilaration, more exasperation. Less Hard Knocks, more hard knocks. It hasn’t always been that way, just for the last four decades.
Welcome to the Bears, Caleb. See if you can save them.
That’s been the underlying pressure since the day they drafted him No. 1 overall. The blueprint for this season was to stack enough talent on both sides of the ball to give Williams margin as he developed, but the real ask — the one that will decide their future — is for him to vault them out of this seemingly constant cycle of calamities.
There’s no doubt Williams feels that, and it was evident Wednesday. As coach Matt Eberflus pleaded with reporters and everyone else to move on from the debacle against the Commanders, in which egregious coaching errors and cornerback Tyrique Stevenson inexcusably checking out contributed to his team losing on a Hail Mary, Williams took the high road.
He smirked at the word “drama” when asked for his thoughts on the Bears’ current ordeal, in which several veterans have publicly voiced objection to coaching decisions, then did something Eberflus could learn from: He pointed straight at himself.
“There's obviously a sense of accountability that I have to take,” Williams said. “Didn't play well in the first half. We had stalled drives and [we weren’t] finding ways to put ourselves in position to be able to score.
“If we keep putting points on the board, if I keep doing my job to the best of my ability, finding ways to get points, protect the football, we [will] win a lot of games — especially with the defense that we have.”
That’s genuine responsibility, not the surface-level comments like, “That starts with me,” followed by zero specifics that Eberflus and other coaches use.
Williams’ miserable first half really stuck with him, as it should have. He completed just 3 of 8 passes for 33 yards, cost the Bears points shortly before halftime by taking a sack that took them out of field-goal range and failed to breach the red zone.
He still wasn’t good through the early part of the fourth quarter, when he had completed 27% of his passes and had a 39.6 passer rating. No amount of dominant defense and good fortune is going to compensate for that, and at no point did Williams try to manufacture an excuse for it or claim it wasn’t as bad as it looked.
But then he and the offense snapped, as he put it, and he closed the game completing 6 of 9 passes for 96 yards while leading them to a near-touchdown before the fateful Doug Kramer play and an actual touchdown and two-point conversion with 25 seconds left to rally the Bears from a 12-0 deficit to a 15-12 lead.
Being a rookie starting quarterback in the NFL is grueling work that takes a stomach of steel, and Williams endured it for more than 59 minutes to finally wrest control of the game.
Only to watch his coach and teammates let it slip away.
“Right in that moment, you're angry,” Williams said. “You're furious that you just lost and you lost that way.”
It’d be fascinating to know everything that’s going through Williams’ mind this week, especially considering he had concerns about the Bears’ haphazard history before they drafted him.
Does he think this is crazy? Does he realize self-inflicted storms are the norm? Does he worry the next one is right around the corner?
“Putting everything on a Hail Mary, and everything’s exploding on the outside... We have to control everything in the interior in here and we’ve got to focus on winning this game that we have now,” Williams said. “We had our 24-hour period to feel how we felt, but we’ve got to move on.”
Many have tried.
Eberflus hasn’t been able to escape his epic fourth-quarter meltdowns, off-field snafus and the ensuing exacerbation at the microphone as he tried to defend and explain them. Each new fiasco brings those back to the forefront, and to this point, those have defined his tenure.
Keeping digging through the Halas Hall archives and there are plenty more examples with Matt Nagy, Marc Trestman and others, invariably followed by cleaning house and clunky restarts.
This time, oddly, the Bears still have a winning record at 4-3 as they try to emerge from the mess. But it sure feels like reality is about blindside them. They have two more games against bad or mid-level opponents — the Cardinals on Sunday, then a home game against the Patriots — before the schedule gets significantly tougher.
Very little about their path to this point suggests they’re going to stay afloat once they run up against the Packers, Vikings, Lions and others awaiting them down the stretch. And it’s implausible to think Williams can cover for all the flaws we’ve seen so far when he’s still trying to find his footing.
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