NFL Analysis
11/15/24
10 min read
Chicago’s Struggles, Caleb Williams’ Development: Why the Bears Need Change
This isn’t the type of season that many expected from 2024 No. 1 overall pick Caleb Williams.
Williams has long been on the NFL Draft’s radar, returning to his time as a prized recruit at Gonzaga College HS. There, he earned the prestige of the No. 1 quarterback recruit in his class and Elite 11 MVP honors — the early makings of a prospect worth watching.
Three years with Lincoln Riley’s offense across Oklahoma and USC further affirmed what many felt: Williams has the goods. The declaration and transition from prized recruit to top NFL pro prospect came in 2022, with Williams blistering his way to the fringes of the College Football Playoff at USC en route to a Heisman Trophy in 2022.
Williams’ encore season at USC in 2023, his last at the college level, didn’t have the same hardware. Still, Williams statistically was more efficient in several ways. He posted a better completion percentage, a higher yards-per-attempt average, and a better passer rating.
The production and the creativity that rivals some of the NFL’s best quarterbacks created a resume well deserving of the No. 1 overall pick.
The Chicago Bears gladly jumped at the chance to make it happen. Thanks to their efforts in building up their depth chart around another young quarterback, Justin Fields, many felt Chicago could offer one of the best environments for a rookie quarterback in recent memory.
As it turns out, many were wrong.
Bears' Never-Ending Cycle
Williams’ rookie season has been filled with growing pains. The Bears have stumbled, losing three straight games after a 4-2 start. The offensive coordinator has been relieved of his duties.
Williams leads the league in sacks taken (38 entering Week 11), with more than 11 percent of his dropbacks ending in sacks. His adjusted net yards per attempt (4.46 ANY/A) ranks 47th out of 70 rookie starting quarterbacks in the NFL since 2000 with at least 75 pass attempts through Week 10.
This is not the kiss of death for Williams’ NFL career. But it is a sobering reality relative to a hype train built all offseason long — this is proving not to be the best situation a No. 1 overall pick has ever walked into.
Chicago will have to bear the brunt of that organizationally, as it feels like the coaching staff changes entering 2025 should probably not stop with an offensive coordinator.
This is the game the Bears have played for years. For the past decade, Bears football has seen cycle after cycle of partial resets, incomplete front office and coaching staff transitions, and reinvestments into new quarterbacks with old regimes on hot seats.
The Bears have done it again with head coach Matt Eberflus, who has a defensive background, and their prized quarterback in Williams. Eberflus and former OC Shane Waldron failed to get Williams to execute operationally at a high level, an organizational misstep that Chicago would be wise to rectify aggressively this offseason.
That is where the irony of Caleb’s rookie season kicks in. Execution and consistency in the operations of a play design were always the biggest hurdles that Williams needed to clear — and that’s a significant piece of information those running the franchise should have been mindful of throughout the pre-draft process, leading up to drafting Williams in the first place.
When watching Caleb’s Bears film, there’s a firm case that Williams is exactly the player he was at USC the past two years. His current struggles amplify his need for growth through experience and a much better infrastructure of coaching and design around him to facilitate that growth. The answers from an offensive design and structure perspective underscore a massive misstep by the Bears.
Interim offensive coordinator Thomas Brown has a strong reputation in the league. He was a member of Sean McVay's coaching staff from 2020 through 2022, including two years as the assistant head coach on that staff.
However, how much change the Bears can realistically implement into their play design midseason remains to be seen. When watching Chicago’s offense, the critiques can be divided into two buckets of root causes: those of the offense and those of Williams.
Offensive Issues
- Precision of routes & attention to detail
- Generating enough easy completions outside the pocket
- Personnel role optimization
- A lack of core identity in the scheme
- Supporting cast regression
These are the things outside of Williams’ control. Routes run short of the sticks on third down. Underwhelming and static routes leave receivers with little room to work and the quarterback with even less room to squeeze a football in.
Schemed throws that offer easy completions are too simple or unnecessarily complicated. For a quarterback capable of running, you’ve seen little in the way of designed rollouts to get Williams outside the pocket and on the edge outside of play action. Williams has attempted just 14 attempts this season outside the pocket while throwing the ball within 3.5 seconds of the snap.
Another 30 attempts this season have come outside the pocket in more than 3.5 seconds — well outside the expected timeframe to decide on a designed rollout. There have been interruptions along the offensive line, and the execution up front has been underwhelming.
Consider that the Bears also made aggressive moves for wide receivers this offseason. Keenan Allen is 32 and, sadly, looks like it. He’s not showcasing any burst and disappointing separation ability. These are all reasons that the pre-season hype around Chicago’s offensive system has fizzled, much of it due to the people left in charge of putting all of these new pieces together.
The team’s second top-10 draft pick this year, WR Rome Odunze, has flashed. But he has primarily been a low percentage target other than working some hitches underneath. It isn’t a knock of Odunze himself, but more an embodiment of the overall flaws within the scheme and group of talent collected to execute it.
Odunze was a vertical plane monster in 2023 for the Washington Huskies. He caught 47 of his 85 targets on attempts 10+ air yards down the field, posting 1,209 yards and 10 scores on those opportunities last season. This season, Odunze has caught 11 passes of 29 targets on attempts farther than 10 yards downfield.
The statistical dropoff extends to Williams, too. This is where Williams’ shortcomings as a prospect and areas for growth reappear in his Bears film.
Williams’ Biggest Areas For Growth
- Footwork and timing consistency
- Needs to be more greedy for easy completions, not big plays
- More anticipation to trust throws early
These are generally footnotes on most rookie quarterbacks. There’s nothing earth-shattering, and it bears — pun intended — to be stated again that Williams’ skills are off the charts in several ways.
He has a beautiful mind for the game, creating completions where most won’t find any with eye manipulation, a dynamic arm with various release points, and an instinctive feel for a compressed pocket and where to flush to space. Still, too much of any good thing can be bad, particularly without a structure around it.
And this is what the Bears are missing.
Williams needs to be reeled in with his aggressive tendencies and be more operationally efficient. You see some involvement from Williams at the line of scrimmage pre-snap. He will often signal to a receiver and try to pick and choose his spots with routes against certain pre-snap looks.
With a new offensive scheme, new wide receivers, a new level of competition, and a system that has proven poor enough to justify firing the offensive coordinator, it is fair to question whether this is too much too soon.
The Bears might be comfortable letting Williams drink through the firehose and take his lumps — teams have done that before, after all. But the firing of an offensive coordinator, a head coach on the hot seat, and a league-leading 38 sacks in nine games suggest otherwise.
His success at USC on extended plays surely did not help with this reinforcement of consistently playing within the structure and transitioning to a faster game with fewer margins within each play. At USC in 2023, Williams attempted 40 passes 20+ yards downfield while holding the ball for at least three seconds and completed 55 percent.
Williams is four of 25 on such attempts (16 percent completion) for 152 yards with one touchdown and three interceptions through 10 weeks as a rookie, good for a passer rating of 26.2.
The percentage of his attempts in 2023 and 2024 under these conditions are comparable, as they’re between 8.5 percent and 10 percent of his total attempts in each season at USC and Chicago. Even when scaling back the intended air yards to 10+ yards downfield after 3 seconds or more from snap to release, Williams is 10 of 43 (23 percent completion) for 265 yards and a passer rating of 39.2 this season.
This was always the most significant hurdle he would have to clear. The margins in the NFL game are too tight to consistently live this way. And Williams doesn’t have the right voice in his ear to learn to walk that tightrope.
His quick game and sub-2.5-second time to throw reps are productive. He’s completing more than 70 percent of his attempts this season when he gets the ball out in under that amount of time with quick decisions.
However, when you watch Williams, you can tell he doesn’t equally trust all of his receivers. In addition to some footwork not in sync with his route progressions, this leads to frustrating misses and errant passes into windows Williams can easily hit. And that was to be expected based on his USC tape.
It’s been a bumpy ride for Chicago. There’s plenty of blame to go around. Not every button Ryan Poles pushed this offseason has worked. Eberflus’ hire of Waldron has already proven faulty to the point of termination.
Williams himself has room for growth and has left plays on the field — as have his receivers. Both have been let down at times by the protection scheme.
Bears fans should take solace in this: Williams is as advertised, regarding who he is and is not.
He is the player he showcased himself to be on tape coming out of USC. But the translatability of his preferred style has sometimes gotten him into trouble amid a crumbling offense system around him.
There is too much new at once without proper guidelines and coaching to play efficiently and develop discipline at the position. That’s nothing to worry about in the long term just yet. Still, it underscores the need for this franchise to get its next hires of people to work with Williams correct.
And fast.
