The Chicago Bears fired embattled head coach Matt Eberflus after Week 13. Somewhere, one finger on a severed monkey’s paw slowly curled.
Chicago’s decision to promote interim offensive coordinator Thomas Brown to the top job made sense. After all, his playbook of quick-release passes and directive to run at the first sign of pressure had unlocked some of rookie quarterback Caleb Williams’s best football this fall.
This did not pan out on the field. The Bears gained five yards of total offense in the first half of Brown’s Week 14 debut against the San Francisco 49ers. With a chance to throw a wrench in NFC North rival Minnesota’s chances to win a division title, Chicago’s offense once again shrank.
There, on the bench after absorbing a brutal hit from the Vikings’ relentless pass rush after a second red zone drive thoroughly botched by stupid penalties, Williams found a way to sum up the Bears’ 2024 without a single word.
this is what playing quarterback for the Chicago Bears does to a man pic.twitter.com/FR7bBXCcod
— Christian D'Andrea (@TrainIsland) December 17, 2024
That is the face of a man who is battered and exhausted. He’s stuck behind an offensive line that allowed him so little time to throw only one of his first half passes traveled more than five yards beyond the line of scrimmage. His offense ran 10 plays inside the Minnesota 21-yard line and committed stupid, drive-stalling penalties on four of them.
The rookie was tossed into the same centrifuge that separated Justin Fields from his potential and is subject to the same pain a litany of once-vaunted quarterbacks have felt before him. Today is December 16, 2024. It is the day Caleb Williams truly became a Chicago Bear.
