Caleb Williams is getting the full Bears experience crammed into his rookie season.
It would’ve been hard for him or anyone else to imagine that this much would go wrong so early in his career, but there he stood Sunday on the sideline at Soldier Field watching everything he’d done right unravel in a loss to the Packers.
Williams drove the Bears in range of a game-winning field goal in the final minutes only for the Packers to celebrate a 20-19 victory after defensive tackle Karl Brooks blocked Cairo Santos’ 46-yard field goal as time ran out. The Bears’ 11-game losing streak now spans three Bears hopefuls, with Williams following Justin Fields and Mitch Trubisky in the unpleasant tradition.
In his first 10 games with the Bears, Williams has struggled individually more than at any point in his college career, had two games in which he had the Bears in position to win and they squandered it and endured an offensive coordinator so inept in Shane Waldron that he was fired last week and replaced by assistant Thomas Brown.
“You keep going,” Williams said when asked how he deals with so many things going haywire. “That’s my mindset for just about anything. … That’s all you can do.”
If he keeps doing that, maybe he’ll eventually prove to be Bears-proof, but there’s a long way to go.
The coordinator change seemed to do Williams some good, though it simultaneously raised the question of why coach Matt Eberflus chose Waldron over Brown in the first place and then took so long to realize he needed to make a change.
There was a flicker in Williams’ performance after three consecutive dreary games, and his play rekindled enthusiasm about his trajectory for the rest of the season. At 4-6 and with a ruthless schedule ahead, the playoffs are a fantasy for the Bears, making Williams’ development by far the most important part of the homestretch.
He looked solid — not amazing, but certainly a step forward — from start to finish and completed 23 of 31 passes for 231 yards and a 95.0 passer rating. He also ran nine times for 70 yards, including four times to convert on third or fourth down.
The finished product has to be better than that, but Brown at least got Williams moving in the right direction. He streamlined the offense, opened up better communication, emboldened Williams as a runner and called a sensible game that avoided the disasters that got Waldron in trouble.
All of that, as well as getting calls in quicker, made Williams’ job easier.
“As soon as a play [ended], Thomas was right on the headset giving me the next play,” Williams said. “From there, he just strung plays together pretty well.”
Facing arguably the best defense they’ve seen this season, the Bears had their third-highest yardage total at 391 and most third-down success, converting 9 of 16. Of the seven they didn’t convert, they picked up three on fourth down.
Williams was good most of the day and great at the end. It’s been a while since the Bears had a quarterback who could go win a game late, and Williams did his part in that effort.
Starting from his own 30-yard line and trailing 20-19, Williams got sacked twice in a row and came out of the two-minute warning facing a seemingly hopeless third-and-19 from his own 21.
He came through with a 16-yard pass to Rome Odunze, then followed on fourth-and-three with a 21-yarder to Odunze on the right sideline. With the Packers reeling, Williams fired to Keenan Allen for 12 yards to their 30-yard line with 35 seconds left.
After a two-yard run by Roschon Johnson, Eberflus was content to let the clock run down and try for the game winner.
What happened next, like the Commanders’ Hail Mary and the offensive coordinator fiasco, was out of Williams’ control. By getting the Bears to the 28-yard line with a timeout in hand, he did his job.
“There’s a lot of positives out there,” wide receiver DJ Moore said. “It just so happened that Cairo got his kick blocked. We could’ve done more to not even put him in that situation.”
Williams went there, too, looking at it as “a situation to learn from” rather than pitying himself.
He pointed to the Bears’ previous drive, when they were up 19-14 with six minutes left and got a first down near midfield but punted soon after. Eating more clock and tacking on more points would’ve helped.
“If we score right there, put three points on the board or anything like that, it makes the game a lot different,” he said.
This season is littered with ifs. The Bears believed they were bringing Williams into a much sturdier situation that wasn’t so regularly at risk of toppling. Regardless of how they got there, it’s another loss that buries them deeper in the NFC North, where everyone else is 7-3 or better.
It gets tougher for the Bears at large and Williams specifically next week with the Vikings coming to the lakefront. They’re an elite defense run by a mastermind in coordinator Brian Flores. They’re the best in the NFL in pressuring quarterbacks and play lockdown pass coverage.
The tests will keep coming in this gantlet of a second-half schedule. But at least Williams showed a spark again Sunday, and maybe that’s a sign that he’s ready for the challenge.