Who Are the Chicago Bears in Year Two of the Caleb Williams Experience?

In the past year and a half, since Caleb Williams was drafted no. 1 overall, there have been two visions of the Chicago Bears. There’s the promising team that last year was heralded as one of the most complete rosters ever to welcome a top rookie quarterback. The team that got off to a 4-2 start last season. The team that landed the most coveted head coaching candidate this offseason and went all in on receivers and offensive linemen specifically to help its young quarterback. 

But also: This is the ill-fated team that gave up a chance to start last season 5-2 because of  cornerback Tyrique Stevenson’s Fail Mary, then didn’t win another game until Week 18. The team that seemingly validated all of Williams’s family’s predraft fears about its dysfunction when multiple coaches left the team midseason, in part because of issues necessitating the involvement of the human resources department. A team from the city, yes, that produced a pope before a 4,000-yard passer.

The Bears are a team of high highs and low lows, with what looks like one of the broadest spectrums of outcomes in the NFL this season. Smack in the middle is Williams.

We know now, thanks to author Seth Wickersham, that the family primarily saw the hapless latter version of the team as the reality. In the months before the 2024 draft, Williams’s father, Carl, told Wickersham that “Chicago is the place quarterbacks go to die,” a quote that was publicized this past spring in excerpts from Wickersham’s upcoming book, American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback. 

The Williamses, according to the book, were so concerned about a future with the Bears that Carl Williams met with lawyers and entertained far-fetched options like having Caleb sign with the United Football League for a year to avoid the draft and going to Chicago, although those alternatives ultimately seemed unviable. The only real option was to try to make the situation so messy that the Bears would feel that they could not draft him. But that would have meant publicly alienating the team and the fan base, and in the end, Caleb didn’t go that route. “I wasn’t ready to nuke the city,” Williams told Wickersham. 

And during the devolution of his rookie season following that promising start, many of Williams and his family’s concerns seemed justified. The offense stagnated under head coach Matt Eberflus and offensive coordinator Shane Waldron. Both coaches were fired midseason. Williams’s dad shared with Wickersham that, as a rookie, his son got little guidance on what he should focus on in film study and was mostly left to figure it out for himself. 

It’s a dysfunctional way to start a career. Still, especially now that the Bears have cleaned house and brought in an offensive-minded head coach in Ben Johnson, the environment for a young quarterback still looks pretty good as Williams enters year two. Although it’s hard to say how Johnson will fare in the top job—especially without Dan Campbell’s motivational skills on tap—his Detroit offenses were prolific, scoring an NFL-high 28.2 points per game from 2022 to 2024, his years as offensive coordinator. In particular, Johnson worked wonders with quarterback Jared Goff’s development, including in areas that will be especially critical for Williams. Although the two are very different athletes, one thing Goff had struggled a lot with before working with Johnson in Detroit was taking sacks––and his sack percentage decreased by 3 percent in his first year under Johnson, in part because of Detroit’s excellent offensive line but also because of Johnson’s savvy calls, which feature motions that slow down reaction times for opposing defenses. A similar trend would go a long way in Chicago, where Williams was sacked a league-high 68 times last year. 

The Bears roster should be more ready to support those goals, too. The offensive line was general manager Ryan Poles’s biggest focus this offseason, and the result is an entirely revamped interior line after the team traded for All-Pro guard Joe Thuney and former Pro Bowler Jonah Jackson and signed Drew Dalman, the top center available in free agency. Not everything on the line is set, though, heading into Week 1—throughout training camp, there was especially rotation at left tackle, between 2022 fifth-round pick Braxton Jones, 2025 second-round pick Ozzy Trapilo, 2024 third-round pick Kiran Amegadjie, and 2024 undrafted free agent Theo Benedet. Although that position is still unresolved, Chicago figures to at least be improved up front. 

Whether all those on-paper improvements come together in reality will probably come down to Williams’s ability not just to learn under the new Johnson regime, but to learn fast. Despite the chaos around him, he mostly played well as a rookie, completing 62.5 percent of his passes, with 20 touchdowns and six interceptions. The moments when he flashed his athleticism, ability to create, and off-platform throws were reminders of why so many had believed that he could be a transcendent talent. 

But Williams struggled to play consistently within structure, which will be a focus for Johnson. One of the first areas Johnson stressed for Williams and the offense was pre-snap procedures, particularly as the Bears are likely to see an uptick in their rate of motion usage going forward. Last season, the Lions ranked fifth in the NFL in pre-snap motion, which they used 70 percent of the time. The Bears, conversely, ranked 19th, using pre-snap motion 55 percent of the time. 

It’s a promising development for the offense but also a challenge under the time constraints of training camp. Already, the pace of the playbook’s installation—and especially Williams’s ability to grasp it—has been a topic in Chicago media. 

In a vacuum, Williams’s preseason struggles are more than understandable. He is working with a new coach, in a new offense, with several new teammates. He’s young, just 23 years old, and came into the NFL with an obvious need to refine his game at the professional level and not over-rely on his athletic gifts. But because of the overwhelming hype around the Johnson hiring, the impression that this is a win-ready roster, Williams’s draft pedigree, and the quick results for draft peers like Jayden Daniels, the Bears won’t have the luxury of making incremental gains. 

This is a pivotal season, both for Williams and for the franchise. There aren’t that many teams in the NFL that seem genuinely capable of winning 13 games but also four. By the end of this season, Williams and Johnson could look like the pairing that will guide Chicago for the next decade-plus, or they could seem like the next Justin Fields or Adam Gase. Last season, it was hard to place Chicago’s struggles at Williams’s feet—his play was good enough, particularly considering the coaching dysfunction, and he was just a rookie, after all. But even though he’s starting over in a new offense with new coaches this year, the expectations will start to mount. Fairly or not, the impression of an overbearing sports family can make things go sour between a team and quarterback even more quickly. 

The Bears have finished without a winning record for six straight years, which gives this team a relatively low bar to clear but also no time to waste. Williams has all the tools to take a second-year leap and become the quarterback the Bears hope that they drafted. He just needs to do it quickly.

Nora Princiotti

Nora Princiotti covers the NFL, culture, and pop music, sometimes all at once. She hosts the podcast ‘Every Single Album,’ appears on ‘The Ringer NFL Show,’ and is The Ringer’s resident Taylor Swift scholar.