As the overall #1 draft pick, Caleb Williams made big strides in his preseason debut against the Buffalo Bills. He looked the part and gave Bears fans a ray of hope, throwing for 95 yards in just seven completions as Chicago routed the Bills by a 33-6 count.
Josh Allen was a non-factor, but the hope in the Bear's second go-round is that Williams will see more of Joe Burrow, the Cincinnati star whose last two seasons have been marred by injury. Burrow settled the nerves of nervous Bengals fans by looking sharp in his brief stint, throwing for 51 yards and a score against Tampa Bay. This should be a fun game to watch, and we’d all like to see Williams and Burrow go head-to-head for as long as possible.
According to The Athletic, there is a strong similarity between these two QBs that can give Chicago some real hope.
The Chicago path vs. the Cincinnati route
The Bengals and Bears are on two distinctly different paths, but the one thing Williams and Burrow share is the fact that they became instant starters. Burrow flashed immediately, completing 65 percent of his passes for almost 2700 yards to go with 13 touchdowns. But he got hit a lot behind a leaky offensive line, and no one was surprised when Burrow tore his ACL and MCL in his left knee after a ten-game season.
Injury-wise, the Bears are hoping for different results with Williams. They’re coming off a 7-10 season that ended with a lot of positives, so the hope is that they can protect Williams well enough to get them to .500 and maybe even battle for a playoff berth. The Justin Fields experience has officially been deemed a failure, and Chicago has even prioritized winning in the preseason, which probably has a lot to do with Matt Eberflus wanting to keep his job.
The QB breakdown: Joe Burrow vs. Caleb Williams
Joe Burrow is mostly a classic pocket passer, but Caleb Williams is a somewhat different animal. The reason he flashed as the number #1 overall pick was due to his ability to make off-schedule plays when he escapes from the pocket to the point where he earned some fairly ridiculous comps to Patrick Mahomes.
But Williams has also shown plenty of savvy as a pocket passer, which is exactly what the Bears want to see against the Bengals. The sample size might be small this week, though—now that Chicago knows what it has in Williams, the idea will be to keep him upright and ready for the season opener when the Bears host the Titans.
Burrow’s initial experience is a big reason for that focus, and so is Minnesota’s debacle with J.J. McCarthy. The Vikings just lost McCarthy for the season, and the last thing the Bears want is to become the second team to lose its star rookie quarterback for the season.
What to watch for
For fans and media, this game has a lot of expectations that go beyond the sandwich game in the preseason schedule. Chicago fans will be looking for Caleb Williams to do exactly what he did against Buffalo. Eberflus and the rest of the coaching staff will be breaking down the details and identifying the cleanup work they need to do before the Bears head to Kansas City to see Mahomes and company before their opener.
Burrow will also be looking for more of the same. He’s spoken multiple times this season about doing offseason work with an eye on lasting through the entire year, so a mostly risk-free quarter would probably be the ideal outcome for Joe Cool. The one thing both teams want to see is both quarterbacks smiling on the sideline as the clock ticks down, sporting a towel while nursing a cold drink rather than hobbling around or being wheeled off on a cart.
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