Following their tradition, Bears drop the ball on QB Caleb Williams' rookie season
As the Bears prepare for their season finale against the Packers on Sunday at Lambeau Field, they've got issues far bigger than trying to snap their 10-game losing streak and bust their slump of 11 consecutive losses to Green Bay.
They're looking to re-launch as an organization yet again and untangle the mess that ensnared quarterback Caleb Williams in his rookie season.
Heading into the Green Bay game, his first appearance at Lambeau Field, his 87.4 passer rating ranks 24th among the 38 quarterbacks who have thrown at least 200 passes. He’s 18th in yards (3,393), 16th in touchdowns (19) and 33rd in completion percentage (61.9).
Williams has rolled with the punches and stayed upbeat, but this is business as usual for the Bears.
When they drafted Mitch Trubisky second overall in 2017, it was amid a frosty, disjointed relationship between former general manager Ryan Pace and coach John Fox.
When Pace traded up in 2021 to take Justin Fields at No. 11, he already had promised the starting job to veteran Andy Dalton in order to persuade him to sign with the Bears instead of the 49ers that offseason.
Pace and former coach Matt Nagy presented a plan to "red-shirt" Fields even though he'd come from the peak of college football at Ohio State, and that meant minimal time working with the first-string offense. That came back to bite the Bears big time when Dalton got hurt in Week 2 and they turned to Fields.
Williams' onboarding has been just as haphazard. Bears general manager Ryan Poles entrusted him to coach Matt Eberflus and offensive coordinator Shane Waldron — both of whom were fired by the end of November — and put him behind a patchwork offensive line.
Given Williams' concerns about the Bears and their past mishandling of quarterbacks leading up to the draft, he'd have every right to be as frustrated as Trubisky and Fields were.
“It’s not exactly what I was worried about, but it’s been tough and challenging when you have to come in here and learn a whole new type of system and all these different things and then you have a multitude of different things that happen, whether it’s coaches being fired or coaches being promoted, a bunch of different things," Williams said this week. "Being able to go through this and being able to have this dysfunctional year [with] coaches and all of that, not winning as much as we wanted to, I think it’s going to be better for myself and better for us. But I wouldn’t say this is exactly what I was [worried about] or anything like that.”
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