2024 Chicago Bears at the bye.

A look at the Chicago Bears so far this season.

The trade with the Carolina Panthers that yielded the number one pick in the 2024 NFL draft. Despite the Heisman hype, it was a pretty good guess that it was going to take time for Caleb Williams to develop as a quarterback.

Top picks normally are selected by teams with the worst record, which means that the club is facing a challenge to provide an offensive line that can protect this new valuable commodity.

Thus, having finished with the tenth best record in 2023, the Chicago Bears at least were not starting at the bottom of the proverbial cliff. But they did draft OL Darnell Wright from Tennessee, who started all seventeen games.

Third-year player Braxton Jones and injury prone Tevin Jenkins have added a level of stability that was not present in 2022 and 2023.

Williams started off a little shaky despite a season-opening win against Tennessee by completing 14 of 29 passes and a QB rating of 55.7.

Those numbers dipped a little in the second game, a 19-16 loss to a very good Houston Texans teams, led by C.J. Stroud, the benchmark for rookie qb’s this year.

The third game was a tough road loss at Indy, but Caleb put up some huge numbers with 52 pass attempts for 363 yards. The next game began a three-game win streak with a victory over the Rams and Caleb’s first three-digit game rating. Offensively, the Bears have slightly out gained their opponents 1809 to 1752 yards. They have also been penalized far less than the competition, 37 times for 280 yards versus 47/348.

Wins over the hapless Panthers and Jaguars saw Williams’ passer rating soar above 120. The true test of the Bears team will come in mid-November with games against NFC North foes Green Bay, Minnesota, and a Thanksgiving Day game at Detroit.

Chicago Bears coach Matt Eberflus

Coach Matt Eberflus talked about Caleb’s progress after the Jaguars game, “I think the way he’s prepared going into it from Week 1 all the way through Week 6. He’s proven that he’s gotten better every single week. We’ve gotten better as a football team. I just think that we’re just trying to keep doing that. We know that in order to be good in this league, you got to be getting better every single week. We have to do that this week too.”

After the Panthers win, Williams was asked how he felt going into the London game. “The games even that we lost,” he said, “we were right there. Most of them were just small details throughout the game that we were missing. I think after those losses, and even after this week and the week before, these wins, the leaders and things like that, understanding we’ve got a lot of room to get better. We’ve got a lot of things that we need to fix. Like this week, I think it was Thursday. We didn’t have our best practice offensively. The next day, the leaders met kind of a little bit walking off the field on the offensive side and said, we need to be better tomorrow. We came back the next day, locked in and focused, and understanding the situation and us just pushing each other for that next day, and it led into the game I think. Like I always talk about, the personality and things like that of the team are going to continue to grow. We are excited. We understand that we have to keep growing and keep progressing, but definitely excited about being 3-2.”

Before the Rams win, offensive coordinator Shane Waldron was asked about William’s comfort level. “I think for us going back to the comfort level is just the operation, down in, down out, in and out of the huddle, owning play calls, understanding the more reps that he’s accumulating the more chances he’s able to see different structures of defense. And we talked about that comfort level leads to stealing a second, two seconds, three seconds here on the front end and the back end if we do huddle or if we’re at the line of scrimmage. And the more and more comfortable we get as an offense, the more and more time we can use to attack the defense or settle into different structures that we’re seeing.”

Caleb WIlliams stats in Chicago Bears games this season.

WeekTeamScoreComp-AttYdsTD/IntRating
1TennW 24-1714-29930 / 055.7
2@HouL 16-1923-371740 / 251
3@IndyL 16-2133-523632 / 280.8
4RamsW 24-1817-231571 /0106.6
5PanthersW 36-1020-293042 /0126.2
6JagsW 35-1623-292264 /1124.4

Williams was looking at a Heisman showdown with Washington Commanders QB Jayden Daniels, but he’s questionable to play in Sunday’s game. That could change of course, but it moved the Bears from an underdog to a favorite in this game.

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