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Good morning, friends!
Yesterday gave us hope.
Caleb Williams is the guy. The rookie made throws we’ve never seen a quarterback make in a Chicago Bears uniform – and it still wasn’t enough.
With the loss, Matt Eberflus dropped to 14-31 as head coach, including 5-18 in one-score games. He’s also just 2-12 against the NFC North with a battle against the 10-1 Detroit Lions coming in three days.
There are no good stats for Eberflus in Chicago anymore. His longest-active home winning streak in the league? Snapped in Week 10 – and now the Bears have lost three straight at Soldier Field. His defense holding opponents under 21 points for 13 consecutive games dating back to 2023? Gone – with opponents averaging 24.5 points against in the last four.
The good news for Eberflus? Chicago has never fired a head coach during the season. It’s not in the nature of the family-oriented McCaskeys. Otherwise, after Thanksgiving with five games left would make plenty of sense for the Bears to use as an audition for likely candidate and recently promoted offensive coordinator Thomas Brown.
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— Patrick Norton
As Bears reach breaking point, Caleb Williams breaks through
How many crushing losses can one team take?
Last Sunday felt like the ultimate gut punch. It still does. The Bears were on a three-game losing skid and had fired their offensive coordinator the previous Tuesday, but somehow had the Packers on the ropes until Green Bay blocked a walk-off 46-yard field goal attempt.
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The Bears easily could’ve crumbled and embarrassed themselves yesterday as a result of another heartbreaker – like what happened in Arizona after the Week 8 Fail Mary against the Commanders.
However, Chicago battled – again. And again, Chicago’s effort and resilience wasn’t enough. Despite Caleb Williams’ late-game heroics in both games, the losing streak carries on, sitting at five.
So, how can we expect the Bears to pull themselves from the rubble of their implosion week after week? If defensive lineman DeMarcus Walker’s attitude after the loss was any indication, this might’ve been Chicago’s breaking point.
“I mean, that was hard to lose that way. This one hurts,” said a visibly demoralized Walker after Sunday’s loss. “Obviously, we’ve been through it all this year, and the year isn’t even close to being over with.”
🧑🏫 CARM’S GRADES | Mark Carman grades every position group and the coaching staff after another heartbreaking loss in Week 12.
The Bears have their quarterback.
It’s not hard to find the silver lining from yesterday’s loss. Williams was brilliant. 32/47, 340 passing yards, two touchdowns, no interceptions.
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Williams’s grasp of the offense has drastically improved in two weeks under Brown. In the three losses leading up to Shane Waldron’s firing, Williams was sacked 18 times for 122 yards and averaged just 156 passing yards while completing 50.5% of his passes.
Under Brown in two starts against significantly better defenses than Washington’s, Arizona’s and New England’s? The No. 1 overall pick has averaged 285.5 yards passing, a 70.5% completion rate and has only been sacked six times for 39 yards. Williams is keeping drives alive with his feet, too, picking up 103 yards on 15 carries since Waldron’s firing.
Just for fun, over a full season? That’d be 4,853.5 passing yards and 875 on the ground. Not a big deal.
When asked after the game about Brown’s impact in just two weeks together, Williams said, “He has a certain aura to him that he just allows you to play free. He knows what he wants. You know he knows what he wants. Whether it’s checks, alerts, all of that, we still have a bunch of those, all these different things. Being able to play free. I think like last game, throughout the whole game, talking to me, communicating to me.”
Whether it was firing lasers to Keenan Allen through nearly non-existent windows, lofting prayers on the run to D’Andre Swift, hurdling linemen on fourth down, or rifling a ball over outstretched defenders to DJ Moore to put the Bears in field goal range to send the game to overtime, Williams did it all.
But before the quarterback willed his team back from down 11 with less than two minutes on the clock, Brown had a message for Williams: “Go be Superman.”
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🔎 GO DEEPER | Nicholas Moreano with more on Caleb Williams’ big day.
CHGO Bears Postgame…
🎧 SPOTIFY | APPLE PODCASTS | Caleb Williams breaks Bears rookie passing record in fifth straight loss
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