The partnership between Bears coach Ben Johnson and quarterback Caleb Williams will debut Sunday when Williams starts the preseason game against the Bills, and it’s the launch point for a connection that will steer the team’s immediate and long-term future.
Of all the responsibilities Johnson took on when the Bears hired him in January, none is bigger than elevating Williams to the top tier of the league. That’s squarely on Johnson now, and the coaching structure he built around Williams involves at least five different voices.
The main people in Williams’ ear are Johnson, quarterbacks coach J.T. Barrett and third-string quarterback Case Keenum, a 14-year veteran who was signed in part as a mentor. Johnson also has passing game coordinator Press Taylor and offensive coordinator Declan Doyle on staff, but they have less direct input to Williams in order to keep the process “very clean,” as Johnson put it.
“There can be a lot of cooks in the kitchen,” Johnson said, “so by design, we’re very selective of who is in charge of what with him.”
Barrett is the only one of the group who has worked with Johnson, having spent the last three seasons as a low-level assistant for him when he was the Lions’ offensive coordinator, and daily delves into the details with him. Johnson is always involved to some extent, of course, and has more in-depth meetings with Williams every time the players have a day off.
The goal is to win the “race,” to use Johnson’s word, to have Williams ready to run the offense by the Sept. 8 season opener against the Vikings.
Everyone in the crew working with Williams, including Johnson, is under 40. Keenum, 37, is as old as Taylor. Doyle, 29, and Barrett, 30, are extremely young for their roles. Taylor, the Jaguars’ offensive coordinator the last three seasons, is the only one of the coaches who has done his current job somewhere else.
None of that is a factor, though, in how they work with each other. Everyone gets a voice, but ultimately, Johnson calls the shots.
“There’s a hierarchy to everything,” Doyle said. “Ben is the guy that’s going to speak to him on the field a lot of times and provides a lot of insight in the meeting room, but his time is valuable, so he can’t be in there all the time.”
Taylor portrayed it as Johnson setting the big-picture agenda and Barrett handling the day-to-day, while he and Doyle will “chime in” during group discussions.
“The biggest thing any time you have a multitude of voices talking to one person is everybody being aligned,” Taylor said. “A lot of it is everybody putting their egos aside, making sure there’s one message for the quarterback and there’s no confusion.”
Training camp has been up and down for Williams so far, though he looked sharp for most of practice Wednesday as he repeatedly hit wide receivers Rome Odunze and Olamide Zaccheaus in 11-on-11 work. In the two-minute drill to finish practice, albeit against the second-string defense, he hit Zaccheaus for a 23-yard pass up the left side to get the offense in field-goal range.
Williams’ main struggles as he has been learning Johnson’s offense have been pre-snap procedures and throwing accuracy. Neither was an issue Wednesday, and after rifling through an accuracy drill, he playfully flashed a “peace” sign to the TV cameras on the sideline.
The delay-of-game penalties have been frustrating, but Johnson defended Williams on Wednesday by saying he’s not the sole reason for those flags and the coaching staff is “loading” players with an expansive playbook.
“The whole inventory of the offense can be thrown at you at any time in a practice,” Taylor said. “In a game, it’s honed in, you’ve repped it every single day and by Sunday you’ve seen four days’ worth of work and the quarterback is anticipating the play calls.”
Johnson said something similar, and Taylor also noted that Johnson’s offense is full of “tags” giving direction to various players to go in motion and “kills” to change the play. He acknowledged, too, there have been instances of him getting the call to Williams “a little bit slow.”
Overall, he was happy with how Williams “is able to spit these plays out” and credited him for making “significant progress” grasping the playbook.
“Week 1, we’re going to be in a good spot,” Johnson said.
That’s ambitious considering how things have been going, and it’s why Williams playing against the Bills is significant after he sat out the first preseason game against the Dolphins. A crisp, clean performance — even in a preseason game — would back up his coach’s optimism and calm everyone down.
