The numbers don’t lie, Williams has a long way to go
Figuring roughly — that is using grade school math rather than a touch screen calculator — Caleb Williams’ goal of becoming the first Bears quarterback to throw for 4,000 yards has only 3,907 more to go.
That works out to 244 yards per game from here on out, or roughly a little more than two and a half times as many as in his first adult game. Only eight NFL quarterbacks threw for that many yards in the first week, with Williams the sorriest of all the starters with 93 yards.
Hint: when a columnist resorts to using numbers in his lede, you can safely assume that he is floundering. Guilty as assumed.
You see, going from a generational talent to the worst player at his position in one week takes some adjusting, leaving us optimists to find kindness among the stench and, honestly, it is a chore to type with one hand while holding the nose with the other.
Not as hard on me as on Williams himself, I must assume, a savior one moment, dancing into the sun and cheers, a statistical regret a couple of hours later, his audience stunned into bewildered confusion.
How to feel? The Bears won, after all, even though the new hero played as if he had his thumbs on backward. From hope to misery, and in public, excuses and promises at hand.
“I will be better,” Williams said. Not to beat statistical roadkill, but he could not be any worse.
Defending Williams is a little like the boy who woke up on Christmas to find a pile of horse manure under the tree. He immediately begins digging into it with both hands. “There’s got to be a pony in there somewhere,” he says. Old jokes are sometimes the most apt.
Bears fans are used to burrowing among the muck, of course, convinced that a treasure awaits, that nothing can be as bad as it seems, and it is too soon to throw the dream out with the dishwater.
How to defend what might be the worst game ever played by a Bears quarterback, and that bag is deep? Well, he did not turn the ball over. There’s that at the top of the list.
Rookie quarterbacks are not supposed to win opening games. It is says so right there in the history of rookie quarterbacks, volume one through 10.
After all, Williams is young. Of course he is, and he was young when he was being touted as the greatest thing since box wine. But consider this. Tyson Bagent, the other quarterback, won his first game as a rookie, going 21 of 29, throwing for a touchdown and finishing with a 97.2 quarterback rating.
Just nerves, opening-game jitters, other great quarterbacks have had awful starts, too. Cling to that and ignore the Tyson Bagent example above.
Blame the offensive line. Easy to do. And the receivers, some blame there. The offensive play caller, whoever that is, bad game plan, bad play calling. Wrong personnel on the field. Asking too much. On and on.
It was Williams overthrowing and underthrowing or not throwing, fitting neatly into the long line of familiar failures. A fluke, an aberration, that was not the Williams on the practice field, the Williams at two colleges, the Heisman winner, the consensus best player of all the players in the draft. Too soon to panic.
“He has belief in himself,” Matt Eberflus said during the week. “He’s comfortable in his own skin. He’s got teammates that believe in him and trust him and know him and that he can lean on.”
Football is a team enterprise, naturally, and leaning is essential, each on the other, but the quarterback is the post on which the critical leaning is done. The key thing is not to damage any of that comfort and belief, so don’t trust your eyes or let your patience overrule.
And yet, the feeling creeps in that after all Williams is just a fresher heel cut from the same loaf as Justin Fields.
Both Bears Past and Bears Future won last week, each indistinguishable in contribution to the results, yet equally suspicious in inability to play quarterback in the National Football League.
Keep looking for that pony.