Welcome to the life of Bear, Caleb Williams, where the drama never stops

The Bears are once again in crisis, and while that may be new for rookie quarterback Caleb Williams, it’s business as usual for the franchise.

The experience is much more similar to this than in the months leading up to the season. Less waves, more spirals. Less excitement, more annoyance. Less hard hits, more hard hits. It hasn’t always been that way, just over the past four decades.

Welcome to the Bears, Caleb. See if you can save them.

That’s been the underlying pressure since the day they drafted him No. 1 overall. The blueprint for this season was to stack enough talent on both sides of the ball to give Williams an edge as he developed, but the real question – the one that will determine their future – is whether he can get them out of this seemingly constant cycle of calamities.

There’s no doubt Williams thinks so, and it was clear on Wednesday. While coach Matt Eberflus begged reporters and everyone else to move on from the debacle against the Commanders, in which glaring coaching errors and cornerback Tyrique Stevenson’s inexcusable checkout contributed to his team losing on a Hail Mary, Williams took the high road .

He grinned at the word “drama” when asked for his thoughts on the Bears’ current ordeal, in which several veterans have publicly objected to coaching decisions, and then did something Eberflus could learn from: He pointed a point at himself.

“There’s obviously a sense of responsibility that I have to take,” Williams said. “I didn’t play well in the first half. We had stalled drives and (we weren’t) finding ways to put ourselves in position to score.

“If we continue to put points on the board, if I continue to do my job the best I can, continue to find ways to score points and protect the football, we will win a lot of games – especially with the defense we have. .”

That’s real responsibility, not superficial comments like, “That starts with me,” followed by zero details that Eberflus and other coaches use.

Williams’ miserable first half really stuck with him, as it should have. He completed just 3 of 8 passes for 33 yards, cost the Bears points shortly before halftime by taking a sack that put them out of field goal range and failed to break the red zone.

He was still not good early in the fourth quarter, when he had completed 27% of his passes and had a passer rating of 39.6. No amount of dominant defense and luck can compensate for that, and at no point did Williams try to make an excuse for it or claim it wasn’t as bad as it seemed.

But then he and the offense broke down, as he put it, and he closed the game by completing 6 of 9 passes for 96 yards while leading them to a near touchdown before the ill-fated Doug Kramer play and a actual touchdown and two-point conversion with There are 25 seconds left to take the Bears from a 12-0 deficit to a 15-12 lead.

Being a starting quarterback in the NFL is tough work that requires a stomach of steel, and Williams lasted more than 59 minutes to finally regain control of the game.

Only to see his coach and teammates let it slip.

“Right then you’re angry,” Williams said. “You’re furious that you just lost and lost like that.”

It would be fascinating to know everything that’s going through Williams’ head this week, especially considering he was concerned about the Bears’ haphazard history before they drafted him.

Does he think this is crazy? Does he realize that self-induced storms are the norm? Does he worry that the next one is just around the corner?

“Putting everything on a Hail Mary, and everything is exploding on the outside… We have to control everything on the interior here and we have to focus on winning this game that we have right now,” Williams said. “We had 24 hours to feel how we felt, but we have to move on.”

Many have tried it.

Eberflus hasn’t been able to escape his epic fourth-quarter meltdowns, off-court snafus and resulting exacerbation at the microphone as he tried to defend and explain them. With each new fiasco they come to the fore, and so far they have defined his tenure.

Continuing to dig through the Halas Hall archives, there are many more examples involving Matt Nagy, Marc Trestman and others, invariably followed by house clearing and clumsy restarts.

This time, oddly enough, the Bears still have a winning record at 4-3 as they try to dig themselves out of the mess. But it certainly feels like reality is washing over them. They have two more games against bad or mediocre opponents – the Cardinals on Sunday, then a home game against the Patriots – before the schedule gets significantly tougher.

Very little about their path to this point suggests they will stay afloat once they encounter the Packers, Vikings, Lions and others waiting for them down the road. And it’s unlikely to think Williams can make up for all the shortcomings we’ve seen so far while still trying to find his balance.