Going into this season, it would’ve been hard to envision a scenario in which quarterback Caleb Williams was a wreck and the Bears got bailed out by their defense. That bizarre combination was exactly how they survived the Buccaneers on Sunday.
The Bears held on for a 27-24 win going into their bye week despite Williams throwing a career-high four interceptions thanks to stellar run defense and timely takeaways against a Bucs team that wasn’t in their weight class. It was the first time they won a game in which their quarterback threw four interceptions since 2010.
They escaped on Cairo Santos’ 38-yard field as time expired, ending an unnecessarily hectic and exhausting night.
Williams had never thrown more than two picks in a game, and the last time he even did that was in the first month of his rookie season. He started hot and propelled the Bears to a 14-0 lead before making some brutal mistakes with three interceptions by halftime.
The Bucs were threatening to take the lead late in the third quarter when Bears cornerback Jaylon Johnson gave the team some breathing room with a pick-six. Johnson darted in front of tight end Cade Otton in scoring range to intercept the pass from Bucs quarterback Baker Mayfield and take it 67 yards for his second career touchdown and a 24-13 lead.
The Bears gave the Bucs chances all the way to the end. With under four minutes left and looking to run the clock out for a win, wide receiver Luther Burden caught a screen pass deep in the Bears’ end of the field and fumbled it away when he got hit in the head.
The Bucs took over at the Bears’ 17-yard line and scored on Bucky Irving’s six-yard touchdown run, then Mayfield tied it at 24 on a scramble for the two-point conversion with 2:51 remaining.
The Bears jumped on the Bucs immediately with touchdowns on their first two possessions.
Williams appeared to cap the first one with a touchdown pass to wide receiver Rome Odunze in the back of the end zone, but Odunze bobbled it as he fell out of bounds and it was ruled incomplete. Two plays later, though, he found Odunze again, this time for a nine-yard touchdown pass.
The second scoring drive was all Luther Burden. Williams hit him across the middle four yards past the line of scrimmage, and Burden broke three tackles on his way to a 56-yard touchdown.
Williams went off track after that, though, and threw three interceptions in the next four possessions. All of them were costly.
The Bears squandered a red-zone trip when Williams threw to Odunze in the end zone, and safety Tykee Smith cut across and picked the pass off at the 3-yard line to shut down the threat.
The play before that interception was dumbfounding. At the end of running back D’Andre Swift’s two-yard run to the Bucs’ 6-yard line, Bears rookie wide receiver got into it with cornerback Jacob Parrish and hit him in the facemask — an automatic flag. That penalty sent the Bears back to second-and-goal from the 21-yard line.
After the Bears’ defense followed by stuffing Mayfield on a fourth-down quarterback sneak, Williams got the ball at the Bucs’ 35-yard line and threw another interception on the very next play.
He closed the half by throwing one from deep in his own territory, immediately after Bears safety Cam Lewis had kept points off the board by intercepting a pass from Mayfield, and that gave the Bucs a chance to steal a field goal just before halftime.
Instead of leading by 20 or more at the half, the Bears went to the locker room up 17-6 with the Bucs getting the ball to start the third quarter. They opened the second half with a touchdown drive to cut the Bears’ lead to 17-13.
The Bears are in great shape — firmly in the playoff field, within striking distance in the NFC North — heading into their bye week, which gives coach Ben Johnson a chance to refine the offense even more. The team has come a long way from when he said going into his debut season that he’d have to scale back his expectations of what players could handle.
It has been a fairly steady progression from that point to where Williams and the offense are now, as Johnson crafts sophisticated game plans and can trust they’ll be executed sharply. It started to click in the second half of last season, and the Bears truly hit the ground running this season with 59 points in their season opener.
They got through some choppiness while Williams was out with a hamstring injury, but he was terrific in his first three games back and has shown major progress as a pocket passer.
The next step for the Bears is to deal with their unfinished business in the North. While they won the division decisively last season, they went 2-4 against the Packers, Lions and Vikings, and they’re already 0-2 this season. There’s no doubt that gnaws on Johnson.
The Bears have tough non-divisional games against the Jaguars and Lions, but the central storyline of the second half of the season will be how they do in the North. They visit the Lions on Thanksgiving, then close the season against the Packers, Lions and Vikings in succession.