There must’ve been a point last season when Bears quarterback Caleb Williams had to realize how much there was that he didn’t know. After a spectacular career at USC, losses mounted and his passer rating sunk as a rookie.
He kept a notebook to jot down a list of things he needed to learn once he got a chance to catch his breath, and as the season progressed, it was clear he was never going to get those answers from former coach Matt Eberflus and offensive coordinator Shane Waldron.
The day after the season ended, Williams made two comments about the upcoming coaching search that revealed what he knew he needed.
First, he implored whoever took the job to “just challenge me” and have no aversion to “speaking truth” when he needed to hear it. And second, when asked directly about top candidate Ben Johnson, then the Lions’ offensive coordinator, he raved about his play-calling brilliance, his “fascinating” strategy and his team’s machinelike execution.
In short, Williams recognized that he needed expertise, and Johnson had it.
So now, seven months into Johnson’s time as coach, Williams is getting exactly what he craved. Johnson is introducing a more sophisticated scheme and sharper operation in every aspect. Along the way, he’s not sugarcoating anything for Williams.
“If it looks good; you want to keep doing it over and over,” Williams said after a relatively light practice Wednesday. “And if it’s bad, you want to hear that, too, because you want to be able to execute exactly how the coach wants it.”
If only the Bears had begun his career like this. He could’ve ridden out these struggles as a rookie and been ready to launch in Year 2 rather than starting over.
The drastic changes certainly have factored into his rocky first two weeks of training camp. In addition to bringing in a new playbook and new terminology, Johnson has changed Williams’ footwork, accelerated his pre-snap process and loaded him up with motions and shifts at the line of scrimmage.
All that will be helpful to Williams if he masters it, but he’s a long way from that point.
“We’re installing a bunch and just seeing how much I can retain,” he said. “I take pride in trying to retain every single detail that we have. That’s where I’ve been growing so far since Ben’s been here.”
Johnson said recently that there’s little or no similarity between how Williams was coached as a rookie and what he’s being taught now. Williams agreed that it was essentially a fresh start, “But with Ben, him and I are going to be here for a while. . . . There’s going to be carryover from now on.”
Williams is going into his second season after the Bears drafted him first overall. Johnson got hired on a five-year, $65 million deal.
Johnson’s job security and influence inside the organization mean he’s working on a long-range timeline in addition to maximizing a roster that general manager Ryan Poles believed was playoff-caliber going into last season, let alone now after several offseason upgrades.
The Bears should be shooting for the playoffs, but Johnson also is trying to build Williams into a championship-level quarterback. Everything he does with Williams is geared toward that more so than short-term success, making the mental workload enormous.
One change that’s obvious even in practices is that Williams has more urgency getting out of the huddle and getting the offense lined up on the ball. Not only does that inject energy into the offense — “It adds a sense of what our mentality is: getting out of the huddle, getting on the ball and we’re going to attack you,” Williams said — but it gives everyone more time to size up the defense and adjust. Johnson’s offense also is packed with pre-snap motions, and Williams is in charge of directing those.
Williams has stumbled over the first seven practices, but that’s typical for a young QB going through so much change.
Johnson sees it getting better. While Bears fans heard the same thing about Justin Fields and Mitch Trubisky, his bluntness about the negatives makes him more believable when he says there are subtle signs that it’s starting to click for Williams.
“He is so much more comfortable right now,” Johnson said this week.
He relayed a conversation he had with Williams on Sunday, when players had the day off, in which he told him his process and preparation are “really clean” at this stage.
The Bears eventually need to see a correlation between that and on-field performance, but not immediately.
Johnson is looking much further down the road than the first preseason game or even the season opener as he tries to set himself and Williams up for a thriving, enduring partnership.
