Game On: Sports News, Highlights & Commentary
- Caleb Williams missed every target in a short throwing drill and even missed the net on his final pass.
- At fan night Caleb Williams scrambled under pressure and threw a duck that was easily intercepted.
- In reps in front of fans he went 5-for-17 with three interceptions, a clearly troubling performance.
- The biggest risk: Ben Johnson's structure-based system may not mesh with Caleb Williams' improvisational strengths.
- Understandable to be worried, yet training camp is for struggles and growth; early bad reps are not definitive.
Coaches around the NFL will tell you that training camp is the time for mistakes, but Caleb Williams really stretched that adage over the weekend. Two videos of Williams went viral, as the second-year QB had some absolutely horrendous passes.
The first came during a drill in which the Bears’ QBs worked against a throwing net in a target drill. Williams somehow managed to miss every target from 10 yards away, then miss the net all together on his final pass.
Williams was noticeably annoyed with himself, and understandably so. This isn’t exactly the kind of thing that makes fans feel confident in a QB they’re banking their entire future on, in a year where Chicago is expected to make a major jump in the NFC North with an upgraded offensive line.
As bad as this clip was, things went worse at fan night as Williams scrambled under duress before throwing up a duck that was easily picked off.
In total Williams went 5-for-17 with three interceptions in his reps in front of fans. Hardly the kind of outing we hoped to see. Now, there are two ways to view this, and neither is particularly incorrect:
The biggest risk in hiring Ben Johnson is that while he’s a brilliant coach, he was a structure-based coordinator now having to work with Williams, a QB who thrives out of structure and improvising a broken plays. It was a bit of a weird fit from the outset, and the worry is going to be that the two just won’t mesh as a head coach and franchise QB.
So it’s okay to be worried about clips like this, while also acknowledging that training camp is made for looking bad — and it’s totally fine to struggle.
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