The Bears believe quarterback Caleb Williams is best when the lights are brightest.
They don’t get any brighter than the Bears playing their season opener against the Vikings — the team he wanted to play for less than a year-and-a-half ago — on “Monday Night Football.”
The Bears have spent the last nine months — in many ways, the longest offseason at Halas Hall in a generation — preparing Williams for the stage. First-time coach Ben Johnson has been the hard-charging director, challenging his main character on and off the field in a way the previous regime never did.
Johnson knows it will take weeks, if not months, to get his offense up on its feet.
Still, opening night can’t be a flop.
“We’re in an entertainment business, you dig?” quarterbacks coach J.T. Barrett said. “With that, we go out there in order to put on a show and go do what we do — and that’s go play at a high level and make plays.”
The stakes this season are enormous. The Bears have staked the future of their franchise on the success of their coach-quarterback pairing.
For Williams to be the star of the show, he needs to improve on the basics that eluded him as a rookie. Johnson took the Bears job because he wanted to work with the former No. 1 pick. Since January, he’s prioritized ways to fast-track his improvement, putting them into practice inside the classroom and practice fields at Halas Hall. Monday night will test what Williams has learned in the following ways:
• His accuracy: Johnson wants Williams to complete 70 percent of his passes this season and set the same goals for training camp practices. Most of the time, particularly early in camp, Williams fell short.
Williams completed just 62.5 percent of his passes last year. This year, the Bears believe the offensive scheme will help him.
“He’s got a place to start and he’s going to have outlets and answers that he needs to find later in the play,” offensive coordinator Declan Doyle said. “And that’s really how that [percentage] goes up, is, when guys are playing through [options] 1 and 2 and they’re able to find 3 and 4, find the [running] back.”
• His demeanor: In the spring, Johnson sat down and showed Williams clips of the quarterback pouting, or even looking dismissive, during games last year. Johnson and Williams decided that wasn’t the team the Bears want to be.
“We don’t want to be a ‘palms-up’ team where we’re questioning everything,” Johnson said. “That’s a little bit of a sign of weakness.”
Barrett said Williams’ bad body language usually emerges when he’s frustrated with himself. It’s good that he cares, he said, but he needs to channel it the right way.
“You have an effect on the team,” Barrett said. “And our emotions handle the motivation of others.”
• His poise in the pocket: Williams was sacked 68 times last year, the third-most in the history of the sport. The Bears added three interior starters — center Drew Dalman and four-time Super Bowl champ Joe Thuney and Pro Bowl player Jonah Jackson at guard — to better protect him. They aren’t as confident at left tackle, though, after Braxton Jones beat out two players with no NFL game experience in a protracted training camp battle.
“Do I feel good back there? I feel great,” Williams said. “Excited to get to go to war with them.”
The quarterback shares responsibility when it comes to pass protection. When he gets in trouble, he needs to throw the ball way. He needs to identify dangers at the line of scrimmage, too, which will be a test of just how much film study he’s done. Williams told his father that coaches didn’t tell him what to watch in the film room last year, according to Seth Wickersham’s upcoming book “American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback.” Williams later said he knew how to watch film but was trying to find ways to be more efficient last year.
Williams said he knows a lot more about the game now than he did last year, in part because of Johnson. That’s crucial against the Vikings, who blitzed more than anyone in football last year.
“There’s gonna be a wrinkle with [defensive coordinator Brian] Flores …” Williams said. “Being able to adjust to those and be level-minded throughout the whole game is really important.”
• His pre-snap operation: What Williams does before every snap has been under a microscope for months. Just putting him under center, as opposed to the shotgun, was the first challenge.
“There was a lot of new,” Johnson said, “from the play-call, to the verbiage, to the cadence, the motions.”
Having the quarterback manipulating those things before getting the ball can be a “huge advantage” in the modern NFL, Johnson said, and the Bears are “trying to find the right balancing act” between adding more concepts and sticking to what Williams finds comfortable.
Motions and cadence will be important Monday. The Bears can send receivers or tight ends in motion to force a Vikings blitzer to stay up on his feet rather than put his hand in the dirt. Williams’ cadence will try to bluff blitzers into either jumping offside or making their intentions known prematurely.
“The cadence is getting strong, it’s getting better,” Williams said. “It’s getting harder to decipher what and when the ball is going to be snapped.”
What happens after that will be fascinating.
Asked what he expects from Williams in their first game together, Johnson was direct.
“Win the football game,” Johnson said. “All that matters is us winning the game.”