The version of Caleb Williams that appears for the Bears when the game is on the line is absolutely what they or any other team is looking for in a franchise quarterback.
He’s calm, clutch and virtually unstoppable. He makes throws others can’t. He darts and dodges. There’s something about him that makes everyone around him believe victory is in sight no matter how dire the situation gets.
If Williams could play like that all the time, there’d be no question about what the Bears have in him and where their future together is headed. It’s the rest of the game, which also matters, that creates so much uncertainty.
Why is he Superman at the end, but nondescript Clark Kent the rest of the game? The Bears need to get him in that phone booth before the opening kickoff instead of waiting until they’re on the brink of defeat.
“That’s something we want to get down,” Williams said Wednesday. “It’s not only from my side of it, it’s just everybody understanding what we can be on offense.
“Towards the end of the game, it’s time to go win and you just get in that mode… The mindset changes in the sense of we have no other option at that point other than to score and fight and fight and fight. We want to showcase throughout the whole game that we can put up points and we can start steamrolling, but until that happens, we’re going to keep winning games whichever way we need.”
Williams has been the best late-game quarterback in the NFL this season. That’s not hyperbole. The numbers show it in every regard.
He has a league-best 143.8 passer rating in the final five minutes, and that’s typically been crunch time for the Bears. Of their nine games, two were out of hand late in one direction or the other, but mostly the pressure has been on. There’s not much filler in his statistics.
His completion percentage, at 65.2, is up five points from the rest of the game, his yards per pass spikes from 6.9 to 11.5, he hasn’t thrown an interception and he has taken just one sack.
“He’s been pretty consistent throughout, staying locked in and dialed in… but [late in games], you’re in more drop-back pass mode, and I don’t want to say he’s got a higher comfort level there, but that is probably where he’s had the majority of his snaps over high school, college and the NFL,” coach Ben Johnson said. “So there probably is just a little bit of, ‘OK, this is my wheelhouse, and I know we’re going to throw it, and defense knows we’re going to throw it, and yet I can go ahead and make a play.’ There might be something to that.”
The Bears can’t just throw on every play — remember when Matt Nagy tried that in 2019, then said, “I’m not an idiot”? — so it will be difficult to replicate that setting for Williams throughout the game. But they have to find something they can extrapolate from the home stretch to the entirety of the game.
In the other 55 minutes of the game, which still very much count, Williams’ passer rating is a Trubiskian 87.5. His completion percentage is a dangerously low 60.4, and his 6.9 yards per pass is insufficient.
Playing like that will more often than not mean the last five minutes are irrelevant.
That’s a concern especially Sunday at the Vikings, whose defensive numbers are down but always present a tremendous challenge under coordinator Brian Flores. He is widely considered to be among the best — if not the best — defensive minds in the league, and Williams is always on alert against him.
“He’s probably one of the more challenging coaches that I’ve had to go against,” said Williams, who described the chess match as fun. “Every single play, he’s challenging you to the full mental capacity… You have to be as close to perfect as you can be.”
The Vikings are 12th in total defense, 18th in points allowed and 24th in opponent passer rating, but are 12th in sacks and eighth in third-down defense. It’s a significant step up from beating up on the Bengals and Giants the last two weeks, when Williams caught fire late and escaped with the fifth and sixth fourth-quarter comeback victories of his career.
His previous game against the Vikings, the season opener, was the opposite scenario. Williams started hot, but plunged as the Bears blew a 17-6 lead in the fourth quarter and lost 27-24.
That game began crumbling for Williams in the middle, when he hit a rut of 9-for-21 passing for 82 yards and a 54.1 passer rating.
So while his late-game heroics are promising, they need to be merely part of the equation, not the whole thing. The next step in his development is playing somewhere close to that level from the start.
