In his preseason debut against the Buffalo Bills, Caleb Williams looked every bit the part of a franchise quarterback drafted #1 overall. Things didn’t go quite as smoothly this time around against the Bengals, as Williams took a step back initially, and the Chicago offense looked familiarly sluggish.
Then Williams got warmed up. He improved slightly with each series, then led two drives, one for a field goal, then another for a late touchdown. Along the way, he threw a beautiful deep ball that drew a PI penalty, then followed up with another perfect long one to fellow rookie Rome Odunze.
After that Williams proceeded to help the Bears recover from an Odunze mental error when the Washington product caught a potential TD pass with his foot on the line, but Chicago’s flashy new rookie QB had his back, rushing for a touchdown after a scramble that looked very familiar to Patrick Mahomes fans.
The Caleb Williams breakdown
Without further ado, let’s get to it and go through Williams’ afternoon series-by-series.
The first one was brutal. It featured a pair of ugly incompletions in which Williams very much looked like a hesitant rookie, and on third down he air-mailed a throw that was so far out of bounds that it drew an intentional grounding flag.
In the series that followed, the Bears were clearly intent on protecting Williams. Two runs gave him a chance to get grounded, literally and figuratively, and on third down he hit a short completion that came up short of the sticks.
The quarterback finally started to look like Caleb Williams a little in series #3. He hit Cole Kmet on first down, throwing into a tight window that ended up two yards short of a first down. He missed the third-down throw on a slant, but the coverage was tight enough to make the incompletion understandable unless there was a better read available.
Series #4 was the one where Williams nearly hit paydirt. A long throw resulted in a PI call that put the Bears in the red zone, and without the penalty, there’s a good chance it would have been a gorgeous completion. The rest was a bit of a mess—a false start followed by what was likely a coverage sack when Williams held the ball too long, then a failed screen followed by a short completion that set up a field goal.
Excitement time: the final drive
It was Williams’ final drive that gave Bears fans a reason to get excited. The running game clicked, and Williams delivered a 12-yard dart for a first down. After that, he dropped a long dime to Odunze to put Chicago back in the red zone.
Odunze nearly became the first-half goat on the series that followed as Caleb Williams once again did his Patrick Mahomes dance. He ducked out of pressure, then threw a corner dart that should have been a touchdown, but Odunze had one foot out of bounds when he came down with it.
Not to worry. Williams closed out his first half by doing another Houdini act, ducking away from pressure, then running for a touchdown when his endzone options were covered. Somehow he managed to get in untouched, which doubtless made Eberflus and the training staff happy to have him healthy and whole after a fine half of work.
For those wondering about the other half of the game, it was strictly an afterthought. Joe Burrow took the day off, so Logan Woodside started, and while he did have a couple of nice throws, Woodside also nearly got himself killed by a couple of brutal corner blitzes.
The Bengals did manage a field goal late in the first half to close to 10-3, but there was clearly no reason to watch them without Burrow making throws. It would have been nice to see a star rookie vs star veteran showdown, but for now we’ll have to leave that one on the drawing board and hope it happens down the line.