Bear Digest

Caleb Williams Trying to Master 'Ebb and Flow' of Bears Offense

Analysis: It's not going to be all up-arrow says Bears coach Matt Eberflus about Caleb Williams' development, and the process will go on daily as their rookie QB tries mastering the offense.

Gene Chamberlain

DeMarcus Walkers View of Changing Bears.mp4
DeMarcus Walkers View of Changing Bears.mp4 /
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Expectations often fail to meet reality with rookie quarterbacks.

The Bears know there is pressure to get first overall pick Caleb Williams up to speed as rapidly as possible, and they know there are preconceived notions about where he should be in running the attack.

They're going by their own plan, not those others.

"We know it's not where the final product is but everyday we see these incremental improvements leading up to that first game," offensive coordinator Shane Waldron said.

Steady, incremental progress was a catch phrase of the Matt Nagy era regarding Mitchell Trubisky and then Justin Fields.

Still, the questions keeping coming for coach Matt Eberflus, Waldron and even Williams' teammates wanting to know where the QB stands in his development.

"Well as you go through training camp, what you do is put a lot of things in and you're trying to put the whole offense in, and you're also installing the defense," Eberflus said. "So he's going to get the whole gamut of looks .

"So there's going to be an ebb and flow to this."

Eberflus warns against expecting Williams progress to come on an directly upward plain. It's halting, sometimes might appear to regress.

"It's gonna be a little step, then go down, then up," Eberflus said. "He's going to have some hard days, and that's by design and happenstance. It's going to happen. We're going to give him some (defensive) looks that are going to be hard for him.

"Then he's gonna learn from them, grow and go to the next step. That's him learning the game up here, learning the speed, learn how the windows close faster and when he does that he's just gonna keep growing and learning."

In the end, the overall trend should be upward but not the day-to-day flow.

"That's not just during training camp," Eberflus said. "That's going to be the first game all the way up to the last game, he's going to keep learning, keep stacking them up and keep learning."

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When the Bears broke minicamp, the simple process of getting the cadence right seemed difficult for Williams. It led to false starts in scrimmages.

"It's all ironed out," guard Teven Jenkins said. "It's ironed out right now. We're doing really good on it and hopefully we keep on continuing and growing off that."

There are instances of ebb and flow within practices, not simply between them or between groups of practices.

Williams will go through several plays, locate targets and get the ball to the receiver in time.

In Monday's practice, he started strong, went through a few struggling series, then finished with an effective two-minute drill. When training camp began, he seemed unable to locate receivers downfield, but very quickly has settled in and locates them.

"Like I say, he has a better grasp of it, just from the outside looking in," running back D'Andre Swift said. "But he has a real quick mindset. Making smarter plays, I'd say, quicker plays. You can just tell he's in a better space.

"That comes along with time. Getting a better understanding of the offense, he had time off so he had more time to study the offense. So you can tell he's made strides since he's been back."

At other points, he has had stretches of indecision, pulled the ball down and they run the extended play drill.

They need work at this anyway, but they don't want it happening down after down because he's not advancing within the offense when this occurs.

One obvious development is how Williams never seems too focused on one receiver. He disburses the ball fairly evenly, trying to find the player open. It was a trademark of his in college, when he never had a receiver go over 59 catches at two schools.

The whole idea is not just Williams' development but Williams and the offense progressing together until they're ready for the opener.

"Yeah, I would say we are coming along," Jenkins said. "We have a long way to go because it's like Day 3 of training camp but I feel like we are ahead of the curve for where we were at last year."

It beats being behind the curve, and that offense last year was in the second season with the same system.

Now they need Williams to iron out that ebb and flow.

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Gene Chamberlain
GENE CHAMBERLAIN

BearDigest.com publisher Gene Chamberlain has covered the Chicago Bears full time as a beat writer since 1994 and prior to this on a part-time basis for 10 years. He covered the Bears as a beat writer for Suburban Chicago Newspapers, the Daily Southtown, Copley News Service and has been a contributor for the Daily Herald, the Associated Press, Bear Report, CBS Sports.com and The Sporting News. He also has worked a prep sports writer for Tribune Newspapers and Sun-Times newspapers.