Bears News: Williams on loss to Vikings: "We felt like we were dominating"

Ariana Pensy · Correspondent · 3 hours ago

CHICAGO - There are a lot of expectations for quarterback Caleb Williams going into his second season. He was a Heisman winner back in college, but that has not seemed to translate to the NFL so far.

In all fairness, he did not have an adequate coaching staff around him last year to help him develop his skills. So, head coach Ben Johnson is essentially working with a rookie. Nonetheless, Williams thought his communication in the season-opening loss against the Minnesota Vikings was solid, although he did say this is a fluid process.

“I think he was getting the plays in fast, and I’ve been able to get out of the huddle. We need to be better with that and I’ve been able to get up to the line, make checks or whatever the case may be,” Williams said. “But, I think it’s a growing process, that it’s going to keep growing. This is the start, definitely not the end. So, we’ll keep growing. We’ll keep being passionate about this offense, him and I, and passionate about this team and winning.”

The process of getting in and out of the huddle could use some improvement, although it was not Chicago’s biggest issue. Penalties hurt the Bears throughout the game, as they totaled 12; three of them were false starts. Perhaps getting out of the huddle sooner would help with the timing of the snap, preventing these false starts.

However, whatever needs to be done to address the excessive penalties, the Bears must do it.

“It starts with getting in and out of the huddle. It starts with being able to just complete some easy passes, check downs and things like that, keep the drives going and I think we did that in the beginning and that’s the hot start (and) I think a few balls got batted,” Williams said. “We had penalties and things like that. So, it showed the drives down, slowed the momentum down that we had and we got to get better at those.”

Chicago needs to address their penalty issue pretty quickly. They play the Detroit Lions in their second division game of the season on Sun. Sept. 14 (Noon / FOX). Against Detroit, you cannot make so many mistakes and come out with the win. You also cannot have entire quarters on offense where you can barely move the ball. That is precisely what happened with the Bears against the Vikings, and it cost them as they were in control for most of the game.

“We felt like we were dominating the game like you said and we were in control up until two scores coming out of half and that mentality is something that we have, something that we preach and that didn’t happen today and it’s not a play call thing. It’s not anything like that,” Williams said. “It’s just being able to go out there and execute the plays that are called and be able to execute them at a high level and that’s something that we take pride in and (Monday), that didn’t happen and we’re going to get back to it … We got a short week and so, we got to move on to the next week.”

Detroit is coming off a tough loss of its own after getting dominated by the Green Bay Packers. Whoever loses this game will be alone in last place in the division, which is a precarious position to start the season and certainly not the one the Bears want to put themselves in.