KANSAS CITY, Mo. — This hasn’t gone nearly as Bears coach Ben Johnson anticipated, and while he’s not panicking, he certainly seems to be resetting his expectations for quarterback Caleb Williams and the offense.
Johnson has taken issue with the offense’s lack of progress a few times throughout the preseason, and the precious momentum it seemed to have lately slammed to a stop Friday in the preseason finale against the Chiefs.
It’s the latest in a series of signs that it’s not as easy as simply replacing Matt Eberflus and Shane Waldron with Johnson and hitting the gas pedal. Even after landing the highest-touted and highest-paid coaching candidate on the market, it’s not going to be a quick fix.
Problems popped up starting with the first play, which ended with a fumbled handoff from Williams to wide receiver Olamide Zaccheaus, and continued with various poor decisions and missteps.
Johnson ripped it as more of the “really sloppy football that has plagued us” in training camp and said, “There were a number of things we could have done a better job of.” He indicated the playbook might need to be scaled back before the Sept. 8 opener against the Vikings, who, by the way, had the No. 5 defense in the NFL last season.
“It is disappointing to me offensively, for sure, because I thought that we’d kind of worked our way out of that,” Johnson said of the errors. “We said this was our first time on the road, and we were going to find out what type of road team we were going to be. If the first quarter was any indication, it’s not good enough.
“We’ve got to get better in a hurry… It’s out of our system, hopefully, for us going into the regular season.”
The key word in that last sentence is “hopefully.” Johnson can’t possibly assume the snags this offense has hit over the past month will magically smooth out once the real games begin and the competition gets steeper.
He was especially angry over the Williams-Zaccheaus fumble because the Bears practiced that play and their other “openers,” as in the script to open the game, all week. Rookie tight end Colston Loveland committed a false start next, putting the Bears at second-and-19 — not at all how Johnson envisioned the offense clicking by this point.
He didn’t like Williams’ third-down incomplete pass to Rome Odunze in the end zone early in the second quarter — “I don’t necessarily love that decision based on the look I saw … There was a safety in the way,” he said — and thought he took a step backward in decisiveness in the pocket, particularly when he held the ball for five seconds on a drive-killing sack. Williams agreed on both points.
In three possessions against the Chiefs’ starters, he completed 6 of 9 passes for 41 yards and a 76.6 passer rating as the Bears punted twice and settled for a field goal after getting a first down in the red zone. His numbers spiked across the board in a two-minute drill against backups.
Big picture, Williams said he felt the same as Johnson did about the offensive performance and called the sloppy play “frustrating.” When asked about it being a persistent theme this summer, Williams said, “We all see it,” referring to the gap between where the offense is and where it should be.
Three weeks ago, Johnson lit up the offense for being “sloppier than we were hoping we would be” and zeroed in on Williams’ pre-snap issues with a warning that, “If it continues like that, we’re not going to win many games.”
A lot should’ve changed since then, but progress has been a slow crawl.
So now what? If Johnson stays the course, there’s a good chance the offense will keep struggling. He might need to scale back his scheme to make the Bears functional to start the season.
“This was always going to be open-ended,” he said on that subject. “We’ll have the right amount of volume so that we can stress the defense, not only in Week 1, but throughout the season. But we’ve got to be able to execute it, so that’s a decision we’ll make.
“To be honest with you, we might have to ebb and flow a little bit after that opening game. Usually it’ll take up until the bye week. It’s placed at just the right time [Week 5] to identify who we are and what we’re going to be for the rest of the season.”
That’s undoubtedly a blow to the optimism at Halas Hall, at least for the short term.
There was an expectation that Johnson was the missing piece for Williams and the roster at large. The Bears believed — and still do — that he can right all the wrongs committed by Eberflus and Waldron. The logic was that pairing the consensus best coach they could’ve hired with the former No. 1 pick would be rocket fuel to a roster that’s otherwise built to compete for a playoff spot.
That’s a lot of pressure on a first-time head coach, and the project has been neither fast nor easy so far.
Johnson promised it’d be hard work when he took the job, but it’s possible he didn’t grasp the full scope of what awaited him. He left a machinelike offense with the Lions that was headed by a four-time Pro Bowl quarterback in Jared Goff who was fully in sync with Johnson’s vision.
Williams, meanwhile, is 23 and has a fraction of the experience — much of it misguided under Eberflus or not very applicable as it pertains to his collegiate stardom.
Johnson’s offense is far more complicated and puts added responsibility on him. The passing windows close much faster in the NFL than they did in the Pac-12, and the pass rushers won’t allow him to casually flip through a menu of receivers in the pocket. Williams must adapt, and Johnson was hired predominantly to make sure he does.