Caleb Williams apoligized to the locker room before the Green Bay Packers game. He held himself responsible for getting offensive coordinator Shane Waldron fired due to poor play. That is what he wanted to happen. However, don’t be fooled. The Chicago Bears rookie quarterback had serious issues with his former play-caller. Part of it was the non-sensical way he strung plays together or his inability to command the room as a leader. That put even more pressure on Williams to pick up the slack.
Yet one of the biggest sticking points might not be what you’d expect. It wasn’t so much a conflict of personalities as it was an inability of Waldron to operate at a high enough speed. Often Williams would have to wait extra seconds for the coordinator to get a play call in. That would force the offense to break the huddle late, leaving the quarterback little time to assess things at the line of scrimmage. Jori Epstein of Yahoo Sports discovered this when discussing the differences with Thomas Brown taking over.
The biggest was his ability to get calls in quickly.
In his first game receiving play-calls from Brown, Williams completed 20% more passes than any of his past three outings. The 2024 first overall draft pick registered his quickest release time yet, at 2.42 seconds on average, and he applied Brown’s principles to escape with his fewest pressured snaps (in raw numbers and percentage) of his career…
…When he returned to the field, decompressing time was over. Play-calls seemed to arrive immediately.
“Super fast, as soon as a play happened,” Williams said. “Thomas was right on the headset giving me the play and then from there, he just strung plays together pretty well.”
Brown continued to repeat calls in case game-day cacophony overpowered his first delivery.
Williams would listen until the play clock hit roughly 30 seconds, then gather teammates in the huddle from about 30 to 25. He broke the huddle around 20 seconds.
“And now you can use all your different cadences,” Williams said. “Mixing it up so the D-line can’t get a jump on the snap.”
Caleb Williams didn’t feel Waldron was helping.
It probably felt like the coordinator was sabotaging him more than anything. Retaining the massive amounts of information to run a professional offense is already difficult. Doing so with precious few seconds left on the play clock is almost impossible. No wonder Williams often looked overwhelmed. He was trying to process information at speeds that even 10-year vets would’ve struggled with. No wonder they had constant protection breakdowns and pre-snap penalties. There was always a sense of being rushed.
Brown seemed to recognize the issue immediately upon taking over. That is why his first order of business was moving to the booth. He wanted to give Caleb Williams more space and also have a great view of the field. This enabled him to identify what the defense was doing and have plays ready to counter. Once one play was over, he would fire the next one into the huddle. That helped settle Williams down. Calm and confidence lead to better rhythm, and better rhythm leads to better execution.
Subscribe to the BFR Youtube channel and ride shotgun with Dave and Ficky as they break down Bears football like nobody else.
I HATED post-game pressers and interviews leading up to big games in Seattle. He sounded cliched, rite, uninspired and not really. connected. I watched a Kyle Shanahan interview around the same time (and had seen Lincoln Riley, Darrell Bevell (the guy who PUT Seattle’s offense together before leaving it for Waldron) and each of those guys were intense, interested, focused and excited both for the players they had, and the game. coming up. Bevell talked in depth about the changes he was making to Tua Tagavailoa from when he and McDaniel arrived, to how Tua became one of the fastest… Read more »
No one has said this, but I thought Fields had to deal with the same problem for three years with Nagy and Getsy. It is ironic that podcasters and fans had to see this with ANOTHER quarterback, to start understanding that it wasn’t the quarterback. Waldron’s inability to think quickly was only matched by Getsy’s inability to think. Period. Waldron’s inability to command a room was only matched by Getsy’s overall disinterest in what was happening on the field as long as he had Fields to take the blame (and not call him out). There is speculation in KC, that… Read more »
I am just guessing here, but I think the reason Waldron was hired was based more on the performance of Seattle’s offense, and less on how he came across in interviews. They also probably looked favorably at the situation he came from, where he was seemingly truly in charge of the offense because Seattle also had a defensive head coach that generally left him alone. And overall, Waldron had more experience as a pure OC than most of those interviewed. I say all that because I also don’t think Kingsbury was ever really considered. I think that was more about… Read more »
Waldron should’ve never been hired not sure why Eberflus and Poles didn’t see any of this during the interview process. Not a good look for either of them. To this point it’s been a wasted season due to the hire of Waldron, OL woes, and retaining Eberflus. The rest of this season should be focused to the development of Caleb.
It’s really a disaster that Caleb has to throw that quickly in order to avoid being sacked because the pathetic offensive line can’t win their blocks regularly. It shows just how poor the talent is, and how poorly they’ve been coached. It means that Caleb is taking a bum rap when people say he’s not throwing for a good YPA. How can he when even intermediate routes take at least 3.1 seconds to develop, given any sort of bump at line by the DBs? Even so, it’s really positive that Brown recognizes his first job is to avoid getting Caleb… Read more »