Justin Fields had just marched the Bears’ starters to three touchdowns in the first half against the Browns to finish the 2022 preseason with the second-best passer rating in the NFL. On the ground floor of the Browns’ stadium after the game, then-coach Matt Eberflus was asked about his second-year quarterback.
“He’s just getting better,” Eberflus said. “He’s a young player. He needs experience. This was a game-like experience for him that he needed to have. He took a big step forward for him and for our football team.”
Except it wasn’t a big step at all.
As good as Fields’ performance was in the Bears’ exhibition finale — he went 14-for-16 for 156 yards and three touchdowns — it wound up being just the latest false start in the Bears’ centurylong search for a franchise quarterback.
The Bears won two of their first three games of the 2022 regular season, then lost 13 of their last 14. Fields wound up with the second-best rushing season for a quarterback, but the Bears made little ground in establishing a long-lost passing game. Fields’ otherworldly preseason passer rating — 133.1 — was almost 60 points higher than the 85.2 he had in the regular season.
The lesson: The preseason isn’t necessarily predictive. Context is everything. That’s why coach Ben Johnson and quarterback Caleb Williams were so frustrated after the game Friday night against the Chiefs even when, in a vacuum, he had decent statistics over two games.
Williams is the third Bears first-round pick since Mitch Trubisky was drafted in 2017 to have to learn a new playbook — and play for a new head coach — in his second season. Trubisky struggled in his first preseason with Nagy — that is, when he played at all. Nagy sat him out for the last two of the Bears’ four preseason games, and he finished 11-for-18 for 94 yards, one touchdown, one interception and a 70.1 passer rating. It didn’t feel like the start of a special season, but it proved to be just that. Trubisky was efficient enough to not spoil the backing of a stellar defense en route to a 12-4 season and the NFC North title.
Williams’ preseason landed somewhere between his first-round predecessors. Playing two of the Bears’ three games, he went 17-for-25 for 220 yards, two touchdowns and a 122.1 passer rating. About two-thirds of his passes came against Bills and Chiefs backups, however. Playing against starters in Kansas City, he went 6-for-9 for 41 yards and a 76.6 passer rating.
It would have been easy for Johnson to be defensive of Williams when the Chiefs game was over, to point to his preseason passer rating and say that everything was going great. Johnson could have expressed the same optimism Eberflus did once Fields finished his last preseason game in ’22. Previous coaches, dating to Marc Trestman, have tried a similar tack.
To his credit, Johnson didn’t. He saw something he found unacceptable in the way the Bears’ starters played.
“Offensively, the first two possessions were really sloppy football that has plagued us in and out of camp so far, and unfortunately that’s what we got here [Friday],” he said. “There was a number of things that we could have done a better job of.”
Williams knows that, too, even as he couched his frustrations by saying that the Bears “understand that it is preseason, and the situation is different than it is in-season.”
That’s true, in a sense — recent Bears history has proved that a strong preseason doesn’t correlate with regular-season success. Still, it’s clear that after an inconsistent preseason showing, on the Halas Hall practice fields and in exhibition games, Williams has questions to answer.
The “Monday Night Football” season opener against the Vikings, after all, is only two weeks away.
“Getting ready to go to war with these guys,” Williams said. “I’m excited, everybody’s excited, and here it comes.”
NOTE: The Bears put cornerback Terell Smith on injured reserve Sunday, one week after he suffered a season-ending knee injury. They also waived six players: wide receiver Samori Toure, guard Chris Glaser, linebacker Swayze Bozeman, tight end Thomas Gordon, safety Mark Perry and cornerback Jeremiah Walker. The Bears, who return to practice Monday, have to whittle their roster down to 53 players by Tuesday at 3 p.m.
