Caleb Williams and the Chicago Bears had the ball with a shot to win the game on the final drive of their Week 2 matchup with the Houston Texans. However, the team and its No. 1 overall pick rookie quarterback ultimately lost 19-13, and the score didn’t tell the full story of just how bad the offense looked at times.
So, while the fact that the Bears are 1-1 on the season and had a real shot at being 2-0 is good news overall, Williams and the offense’s struggles do raise a few concerns about the former Oklahoma and USC QB. After watching the Bears go down in Week 2, here are three reasons that Chicago fans can be a bit worried about their franchise savior.
David Carr syndrome
The Bears' putrid offensive line gave up seven sacks in Week 2 against the Texans, and with two more in Week 1 against the Tennessee Titans, Williams is currently the most-sacked signal-caller in the NFL in 2024.
Caleb Williams is on pace to go down 76.5 times this season, which would either tie (76) or break (77) the record for most sacks taken in a single season. That record was set by former Texans QB David Carr, who like Williams, was the No. 1 overall pick back in 2002.
Carr is the poster boy for why letting your rookie QB get sacked this much is horrific. The older brother of Derek Carr led the league in sacks taken in three of his first four seasons. After setting a record as a rookie, Carr was sacked 698 times in the 2005 season, which is the third-most in league history.
The Fresno State QB had a lot of promise, but a staggering 249 sacks in five seasons in Houston pretty much killed that. Carr became skittish in the pocket and his eyes stopped scanning downfield and instead turned to the oncoming rushers right away.
Williams is a long way from this, but if his line continues to let him go down repeatedly, it could happen.
Playing like a college quarterback
It’s unfair, though, to put 100 percent of the blame for the sacks on the Bears offensive line. Caleb Williams has to claim some responsibility, too.
Like many rookie quarterbacks, Williams is holding the ball for too long and waiting for wider throwing windows to open. He’s also leaving the pocket early to scramble around and try to make a play, and that has resulted in several sacks as well.
At this level, the throwing windows aren’t going to get much bigger, so QBs have to let it fly when they see a sliver of an opening. And they aren’t going to run circles around slow-footed defensive linemen like they did in college either. In the NFL, many of the 270-300-pound linemen are as fast, if not faster, than Williams, so running around without a plan to throw it away or get up-field is not going to work.
Williams looks like most rookie QBs right now, struggling with the speed and small margins of the game, so this is probably not a huge, long-term problem.
That said, Williams is a supremely gifted quarterback who played in innovative Lincoln Riley-designed offensive systems in college. There is a chance that he succeeded based on raw talent and scheme at Oklahoma and USC, and that’s just not enough to become a top NFL quarterback.
The greatest NFL signal-callers need to have talent, yes, but maybe more importantly they need to be a student of the game, have maniacal preparation, extreme competitiveness, and be able to process things quickly.
At this point, we have no idea if Williams has these things or not, although his reported emphasis on things like subverting the rookie wage scale and possibly getting an ownership stake in his team coming out in the draft may hint at where his focus lies.
Williams cannot play the same way he played in college, and until he shows otherwise, this is a reason Bears fans should be a bit concerned.
It’s the Chicago Bears
For whatever reason, the Bears organization has tried and failed to develop quarterbacks over and over and over again. Since Sid Luckman left in 1948, the Bears haven’t had a true, long-term franchise QB to call their own.
Over the past 76 years, the names and faces and just about everything else has changed around the Bears organization many times over. Still, the constant remains that the franchise simply cannot come up with a top NFL QB.
Look, this is a somewhat silly reason for concern about Williams after two games with no hard stats or data or film to back it up. That said, history is history, and for some reason, the Bears seem cursed at QB.
Caleb Williams still has a long road to go before he becomes a success or a bust in this league, so it is way too early to proclaim him the latter. But you can’t tell me that in the back of every Bears fan’ mind when they watched what went down in Week 2 against the Texans, they didn’t think of Johnny Lujack or Bob Williams or Jim Harbaugh or Rex Grossman or Mitchell Trubisky or Justin Fields or all the other highly-drafted Bears signal-callers who didn’t work out.
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