Chicago Bears news: Caleb Williams tried to do too much as a rookie. Ben Johnson can fix that

If you’ve ever played Overcooked with your friends or significant other, you know how overwhelming it can get. Orders coming in hot and fast, not much time to get them done and food can get set on fire very, VERY quickly.

If you’re not an Overcooked person, you might be a fan of Kitchen Nightmares. The iconic show follows Gordon Ramsey as he goes into the worst kitchens in the world, trying to fix them before they go completely bankrupt. The most common theme among these kitchens? The head chef trying to do too much and making everything taste bad, even if intentions were good.

Think of Caleb Williams’ first year with the Chicago Bears like playing Overcooked on the highest level, or a really crazy episode of Kitchen Nightmares. So many things to adjust and try and get done before the snap, then after the snap the Bears looked more like a high school unit than an actual NFL franchise. At one point, the Bears were metaphorically on fire (center Coleman Shelton was pointing out a hot pressure while Williams was adjusting to a run with an out route tagged to it):

The Chicago Bears’ offense was a traveling band of catastrophe, with plays either destroyed by poor offensive line play or receivers running the wrong routes at wrong times. It looked like an offense that was put together two days before a game, as if they were an AAU team. Williams wasn’t blameless in the shortcomings of the offense, however. Despite a 3,500 passing yard and 20 touchdown season, Williams finished 36 out of 47 qualifying QBs in Success Rate and 35 out of 47 EPA per play. He was also sacked 68 times, and among all QBs who had 100 passing attempts under pressure, he was sacked 27.4% of the time. While most rookie QBs were in that same area (Jayden Daniels had a 24% sack rate when pressured, but also had a 6.2% TD rate so he was a bit more boom than bust), Williams couldn’t bring the big plays out often enough for the Bears last season.

The failings of Williams and the Bears’ offense led to major overhauls this offseason, but the biggest one is the hiring of Ben Johnson to be the head coach. Johnson was the NFL playcaller do jour in the NFL last season, helping the Detroit Lions be one of the most explosive offenses in the NFL. Now in Chicago, what can Johnson do to maximize Williams the most? Well, the answer is simple, literally.

What went wrong

Let’s start with some of the major components behind what went wrong in Chicago, looking through the lens of Williams’ season and also through the lens of other rookie QBs. As the number one pick, I think Williams got handed a bit too much to be put on his plate. Playing QB in the NFL is really hard (shocking, I know), but the best teams at transitioning their rookie QB into the speed and complexity of the NFL game make the offense a lot easier for their young guys. Williams was thrown into the fire early, a Week 1 starter given the keys to change and mold the offense into what he wanted it to be at the line of scrimmage. Masters-level QB stuff for a guy just entering college, if we want to keep the analogy going. What resulted is a mess, combining an offensive line that was poor up the middle with a QB who was putting out so many fires he didn’t notice the ones right in front of him.

For the most part, Williams did a fine job of diagnosing where pressure would be coming from, but the response from the pass protection was subpar. Watch what happens when Williams points out this simulated pressure from the Cardinals. He sees safety Budda Baker creeping closer to the line, points it out … and still gets sacked anyway.

There was no communication and no adjustment to simulated pressures throughout the season for the Bears, and even if they got a body on a body, it didn’t last very long. The Bears’ offensive interior had the 11th highest Blown Block Rate in the NFL last season, and it felt like every pressure game the Bears faced would get home, leaving Williams with little time and little answers to said pressures. This one against the Packers feels like a microcosm of what was going on with Chicago’s protection plan up front. 6 man protection vs a 5 man pressure, but the RB doesn’t know that they’re full sliding and thinks it’s a 4 man slide, leaving the EDGE unblocked.

If the pressure was picked up properly, the actual passing game felt like two different offenses being joined together at random. This quote from Ben Johnson spoke loudly about what was showing up on tape for the passing offense in Chicago last season:

Receivers not running on routes and an overall lack of communication and trust among the receivers and QB. There were too many instances of Williams throwing in-breakers wanting his receiver to keep running when they instead opt to sit in a zone. Those things happen early on in a season, not in week 14. The process is correct here, nice pocket movement on this dagger concept. But Williams throws it high and WR Rome Odunze stops in the zone instead of continuing to run.

In turn, the pressure and miscommunication both up front and in the receiver core made Williams look like he didn’t have any trust in his offense, resorting to going creative mode in a world where every level feels like a boss fight. With all of the chaos flying around him, Williams resorted to bad habits and sloppy mechanics at times, sailing deep passes because he’s worried about pressure. This is a play that Williams has made before, but watch how his heels click when stepping up and he tries to rush this throw. The ball ends up flying out of bounds and a missed opportunity goes along with it.

There were various weird turndowns and missed opportunities on tape for Williams, with him resorting to big play hunting just to keep the offense afloat. While being a big game hunter is fine, sometimes you can get caught trying to go for the big one and miss opportunities underneath to keep the offense moving. If there’s anything I’ve learned from watching Kitchen Nightmares, it’s that when everything is on fire in the kitchen, chefs make mistakes trying to fix it all at once. That feels like the perfect one-liner for the Bears’ offense last season.

What needs to be fixed

So, how can Ben Johnson help Caleb Williams realize the potential that made him the top overall pick? For the most part, the Bears have started that process. There’s nothing that helps a young QB who had to do everything when it came to pressure and adjustments than having an experienced offensive line in front of him, and the Bears spent heavily on their interior. Chicago traded for Los Angeles Rams’ guard Jonah Jackson, who has experience in the Ben Johnson offense, then for Kansas City Chiefs’ stalwart guard Joe Thuney. After that, the Bears paid premium money to center Drew Dalman, who was the best center available. Having a veteran interior is going to help Williams sort out pressures and make protection adjustments without asking him to do it all himself. In Detroit, the Lions had center Frank Ragnow sort out protections, giving QB Jared Goff more of a streamlined process pre and post snap.

Schematically, there are things to build around with Williams and this offense, and through some of their free agency and draft moves, Johnson has told us what this offense is going to be. Very early in the offseason, Johnson said this offense was going to be ‘QB-friendly’, and to me that says something different. This isn’t going to be Aaron Rodgers stepping up to the line, looking at the defense then choosing from his rolodex of playcalls like you do in Madden. To me, this sounds like a simplified process for Williams, getting the easy stuff done before you do the difficult. Something that I’ve learned from watching the rookies last season is that asking them to do limited stuff early is fine. Williams was thrown standard dropback stuff much more often than any of his fellow rookies, while the offense didn’t really give him many easy buttons to work with.

Some of the good that came from Williams’ tape last season is that he’s a really good passer on the move. When the Bears got him out of the pocket on designed rollouts and bootlegs, you can see the rotational force he can get on passes through his hips and lower body. On top of that, he has the creativity to find throwing windows for himself outside of the pocket, something most QBs don’t really bring to the table.

Williams is a very good athlete, something that I don’t think the Bears fully used to the maximum last season and it watered down his game. If Ben Johnson wants to do anything to help Williams, it’s letting him use his athleticism and ability to throw off platform with a play action and bootleg based offense to get the ball to athletes in space. Johnson used a lot of play action in Detroit with Jared Goff as his QB, but because Williams is more of an athlete than Goff, expect much more outside the pocket work. You see plays like this one and get excited, because Chicago might have the personnel to run this with new TE Colston Loveland.

On the ground, I think the Bears are going to be more outside zone-based than any other run concept. Detroit ran outside zone more than any other team in the NFL last season per Sports Information Solutions (SIS), but their run game pulls from so many different disciplines. The Bears’ offensive line might be built to do more outside zone blocking, which will really help set up the play action and bootlegs off of that for Williams.

Most importantly, I think this offense is going to lean into what Williams does well right now, then build on the areas where he lacks throughout the season. We saw young QBs like Jayden Daniels and Bo Nix excel when they were asked to do what they’re best at, while their respective coordinators sprinkled in more masters-level QB’ing as the season went on. Expect that for Williams, who should now have more communication in his kitchen, allowing him to cook freely.