Winning tends to smooth over a lot in the NFL, and the Bears are living proof. At 5-2, with Caleb Williams posting numbers Chicago hasn’t been getting from the quarterback spot in years and Ben Johnson already changing the feel of the offense, it would be easy to treat this as all-good news.
But the same issue keeps surfacing, and it’s not going away just because the Bears keep collecting wins.
Chicago keeps letting games get messy after looking in control.
Against New England on Thursday night, the Bears had the Patriots where they wanted them. Chicago was up 20-7 late in the second quarter and had a chance to coast into halftime with real separation. Instead, Drake Maye hit Rhamondre Stevenson on a short pass that turned into a 48-yard touchdown with three seconds left in the half.
Three seconds.
That was all Chicago needed to avoid giving up a touchdown before halftime. The Bears still let it happen anyway.
Maye finished with 321 passing yards and completed 24 of 31 throws, and he wasn’t constantly running for his life while doing it. For long stretches, he looked far too comfortable.
The week before wasn’t much cleaner. Chicago led Atlanta 31-7 in the fourth quarter, then watched the Falcons reel off 16 straight points in less than four minutes.
Both games ended in Bears wins, which is a big reason the defensive breakdowns haven’t drawn even more attention. If Chicago had lost either one, the reaction would have been much louder.
Williams, meanwhile, has been helping cover for some of those issues. He threw for 305 yards against Atlanta and followed that with 308 against New England. Those are the kinds of performances Bears fans haven’t been used to seeing, and Johnson deserves credit for getting the offense rolling.
Still, there’s a danger in having a quarterback who can keep rescuing the situation.
Eventually, people start assuming he’ll do it every time.
Chicago put up 30 points against New England and still needed a 58-yard Cairo Santos field goal to help finish the job. That’s a lot to ask from an offense that had already done enough.
The bigger question is what happens when Williams has a normal day. Maybe the offensive line has trouble.
Maybe a receiver drops a touchdown. Maybe a defense shows up that doesn’t let Johnson control the game the way he wants.
Those games are coming.
When they do, the Bears can’t afford to have the other side of the ball giving away points because of missed assignments or poor angles.
Dennis Allen’s defense isn’t empty of talent. Kyler Gordon has made his mark.
D'Marco Jackson picked off New England. There have been plays worth celebrating.
The problem is what happens in between those plays.
Chicago has shown that a defense can come up with a big turnover and still spend most of the afternoon getting carved up. The Bears have done that more than once lately, and it’s a real issue.
Seattle and Tampa Bay are next, and neither team is going to make life easier while Chicago tries to sort this out.
That makes the next two weeks worth watching. The Bears do not need a dominant defense.
They don’t even need one that flashes every drive. They just need one that stops turning double-digit leads into late-game stress tests.
Johnson was brought in to fix an offense that had frustrated this fan base for years. Seven games into his tenure, there’s plenty of evidence he’s doing that.
Now he’s learning the lesson that eventually comes for every offensive-minded head coach: you can build the perfect plan, watch your quarterback execute it, and still spend the final minutes sweating because the defense can’t get off the field.
At 5-2, the Bears can joke about it.
In Other News...
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For the Bears, the attraction is simple: they know what Wright can bring when he is in a role that lets him impact the game, and they also know their own secondary could use another body with real playmaking history. A reunion would not need to be complicated to make sense, either, since the kind of move being floated would not require a major investment. For now, it is just an idea, but it is the kind that lingers when a team keeps showing the same problems in the back end. [Read more 🡒]