Last year I saw more college football than maybe my entire life. I watched quite a few USC games. I’m no pundit or expert but my feeling is he is going to be a bust.
So far, so bad.
Yeah. He looked exactly like a rookie facing a starting NFL defense for the first time behind an overmatched offensive line.
But he didn’t turn the ball over and made a few solid plays. I’ll give him another week before expecting him to look like CJ Stroud … against CJ Stroud.
Well, he didn’t lose them the game.
Generational talents almost never live up to the hype.
Bad game last night against Houston. The offensive line just sucks, but Caleb should still be better. Those lollipop deep throws may have worked in college and preseason but in real games they’re just picks.
So tired of another strong defense that keeps games close while the offense sputters. Same script for the last 30 years.
I watched the entire game. He wasn’t impressive. Too many throws to nowhere. Too many plays when he is just winging it on his own.
I can’t disagree. The entire offense looked like they didn’t even have a plan the 2nd half, and Caleb made one bad decision after another. But what else would you expect from a rookie who gets terrible pass protection? Two games in, it’s turning into a replay of Justin Fields’ early starts, where he seemed to form bad habits that he never fully shed.
I’m starting to wonder if, instead of stocking up on WRs and a high-priced RB, Poles shouldn’t have invested draft capital and free agency money on better linemen.
Nobody appreciates linemen till the Fancy QB gets knocked out on the 30th sack.
There were a few big plays where he had time and blew it by a lot. DJ Moore looked very frustrated at his quarterback
I just read this – it looks like part of the problem is that they’re letting Williams call protections at the line.
This article calls it a “positive,” but I think it’s stupid. That’s a lot to ask of a rookie QB, and he’s clearly not doing a great job with it.
By contrast, I heard Jason Kelce on MNF last night saying that he called protections when he played, but now Jalen Hurts is doing it himself. So the Bears are asking Williams to do something the Eagles didn’t even have a near-MVP doing until his fourth season as the starter.
To be fair, if the Bears had a Jason Kelce at Center, he’d be making the calls right now. We have a talking turnstile.
I’m not sure if this is good or bad. We don’t know if the pressure problems are a result of bad calls, bad execution, or general confusion over the scheme. I certainly wouldn’t trust Shelton, Davis or Jenkins to make the right calls. Is the cognitive load causing Caleb’s issues? I don’t see any obvious evidence that’s the case.
I haven’t watched a ton of the tape, but I don’t recall a lot of cases where there was an unaccounted for rusher. We had free runners, but that seemed to be because of a whiff, not a misdirected protection.
Shelton can talk?
I suspect some of all three – plus you forgot “inept blockers.”
Right now, I wouldn’t trust them to dial 911 from memory.
So there’s really no alternative to Caleb making those calls, but as I said earlier, it’s asking an awful lot of a rookie. I’m starting to wish Poles had focused on signing (or trading for) a top center instead of Swift or Allen. Top skill players are useless if your O-line is getting mauled every play.
I suspect Poles would have done more to shore up the line if he knew Odunze was going to fall to him in the draft.
Maybe, but our biggest holes were IOL. I hope that if Alt would have dropped, we’d have picked him, but that would have meant either Jones or Wright would move inside. I don’t think Fashanu or Latham are elite enough to cause you to shuffle the only 2 stable OL spots. If no WR was on the board, I think it’s most likely we’d have gone with DL.
There was a little bit of a run on IOLs in the 20-45 range, it’s possible that Poles was counting on something being there in the 3rd and ended up settling on a project guy instead.
… which is pretty typical, and really highlights the pain of that Claypool trade. There were good IOLs available in that range in '23, too.
Evidently Caleb is IDing the pressure pre-snap and is just not getting the protection.
Very few great quarterbacks entered the league on a good team. That’s the whole point of the draft. The great ones figure it out. They won’t win superbowls until you get them all the tools but they won’t look completely lost. Williams didn’t look good even when pressure was light. After watching every game of his last year one of the things that made me think he might be a bust was his inability to handle adversity. As a NFL rookie QB the one thing you are guaranteed is adversity. To paraphrase a great coach he needs to be a goldfish.
Am I missing something? He pointed out the one player that was picked up. The real pressure came from the outside.
Right, but the point is that he didn’t get flushed from the pocket because he failed to make the read. He made the read, adjusted the blocking, and it looks like the Bears actually had everything assigned correctly.
The left tackle got beat too quickly and the RB who was in pass pro shifted up to help the guard (who held his block fine) and didn’t help the tackle who was getting roasted.
The Bears had 7 blockers for 6 rushers. It was 4 v 4 on the right side, which held up OK (not perfect, but you had a RB picking up a blitzer). It was 3 v 2 on the left side but they failed. It’s very hard to pin that on Williams.