My brother once bought me a Rex Grossman Florida Gators jersey, and when Rex was the quarterback of the Chicago Bears, we would hang that jersey in the bar at Josie Woods. Whenever Rex would throw a touchdown pass, I would (drunkenly) shout “WHO WANTS TO GET REXED?!?!?” This was followed by my removing the dank garment from the wall and tossing it over the head of an unwitting bystander to the applause of the celebratory horde. There was an irony to that ritual. I knew Rex Grossman wasn’t a great quarterback and was fairly certain he would never be a great quarterback. But he was our quarterback in that moment and that was all that mattered. I would have done the same for any of ’em.

Miller and Matthews.

Kyle Orton.

Kordell Stewart.

Jay Cutler.

Glennon and Dalton.

Mitch Trubisky.

Justin Fields.

The parade of young men who have attempted to fill this team’s quarterbacking void is a murderer’s row of mediocrity (or worse). It seemed clear to me, as I live out my 43rd year on the planet earth and my 20th year writing about the Chicago Bears, that a franchise quarterback was not something I would ever experience. I had submitted my letter of resignation to my boss at Hope, Incorporated, a subsidiary of Belief Enterprises. The framed pictures of Sarah, Bear and Beatrix that had adorned my office desk were now neatly placed into a cardboard box, as I awaited security’s escort to the parking lot.

But then I woke up on Sunday morning, October 13th, 2024, and everything changed.

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Through five games, Caleb Williams:

• Completion percentage: 62.9%
• Yards: 1,091
  • Two 300-yard games in his last three.
  • Projects to 3,709 yards, just a hundred or so below the most in the history of the franchise
• Touchdowns: 5
• Interceptions: 4
  • 0 in last two games.
• Passer Rating: 81.3
  • Increased 30 points between weeks 2 and 3.
  • Increased 26 points between weeks 3 and 4.
  • Increased 20 points between weeks 4 and 5.
• And for all those salivating over Jayden Daniels, it is interesting to note that Daniels has one (1) more win, one (1) less touchdown and only 44 more passing yards.

So here is my poll question for the comments section below: what are fair seasonal expectations for Caleb Williams? Give me your answers in HAIKU FORM. Best response gets into this week’s game preview.

I picked the 2024 Chicago Bears to win eleven games.

Spoiler alert: the 2024 Chicago Bears are not likely to win eleven games.

That is not to say this cannot be a good season, or even a very good season. It can. The Bears have a defense that will keep them in every single game; they have been borderline incoherent offensively through three weeks and are still a play or two away from being 3-0. Teams in this league are separated by inches, not yards, and the Bears will be improving incrementally as the campaign continues. They can absolutely still be playing relevant football deep into December and competing for one of those wildcard spots.

But there were a few “givens” heading into this season that have not materialized, namely the team’s ability to run the ball and consistently stop the run. The latter is less of a concern. Defenses face undeserved scrutiny when their offenses don’t score enough points. The former, however, is a five-alarm fire. Why can’t they run the ball? Sure, the Bears currently have liabilities at center and right guard, but they also had those liabilities in 2023. The other three starting offensive linemen are exactly the same, but Darnell Wright, Teven Jenkins and Braxton Jones are all performing way below expectations. Is it a performance issue? Is it opposing scheme? Is it simply a group struggling to implement a new system? Hello? Can anyone hear me?

And it seems the Bears themselves have been shocked by this development. You don’t call four runs, including an insane college option on 4th and goal at the one, unless you think you’re a running team. After Sunday in Indy, the Bears are now hopefully well aware of their changed identity. They can’t run the ball. But it seems they sure can toss it around.

This season is all about Caleb Williams and that running game was the primary reason many of us believed he’d have one of the easiest transitions to the NFL in years. Without it, we see games like Sunday, games where he’s being asked to throw the football more than 50 times. And what we saw in Indianapolis was Caleb doing the things supremely talented rookies do when they’re asked to throw the football that much, preparing a pigskin paella of electric moments, befuddling errors, and plenty of flavors that leave us wanting to come back for more. This is likely to be a very good season because of Caleb, who now projects to throw for more 3,500 yards in his rookie campaign. But the hope was he’d be a complementary asset as a rookie and that hope is quickly dwindling as the Bears sit 30th in the league in rushing.

It is still early. My 11-win prediction broke down as 4-2 in NFC North, 2-2 splits with the NFC West and AFC south, and a sweep of the three last place opponents, New England, Carolina, and Washington. I’m not ready to dramatically alter that, with the exception of Minnesota and Sam Darnold looking way better than I had expected. The Bears have three more games before the bye, and that bye week will be their next opportunity to make wholesale changes with personnel and scheme. If they can be 3-3 heading into that break, the season is still right in front of them.

But if the team doesn’t solve their problems in the run game, they’re going to be asking an awful lot from their rookie quarterback. That’ll be a lot of fun to watch, but it also requires slight alterations of seasonal expectations. Asking a rookie quarterback to win you eleven without help is asking too much.

The late-night games are always hell on scheduling, so I’ll put something more palatable together tomorrow. 

Why Do I Like the Chicago Bears This Week?

I.

Always.

Like.

THE.

Chicago.

Bears.

Not Nitpicking Caleb.

Evaluating a rookie quarterback after his first game is much like evaluating a limerick after the first line: nonsensical. (“What do I care if this guy is from NANTUCKET?!?!?!”)

Caleb Williams is going to have bad games. More bad games, I should say. He’s also going to have good games. And by the end of the season, one would hope the player in Green Bay come January bears little resemblance to the player at Soldier Field last weekend.

We must see progress, incremental yet noticeable progress. But I’m not going to be using this space to dissect every quarter, every drive, every snap of his rookie season. At the bye, with a six-game sample size, we’ll chart his progress. Then around Thanksgiving, we’ll chart it again. At the end of the season, he’ll have a body of work to analyze and a list of distinct issues to address this offseason. That’s how it works with rookies, despite the now cottage industry of former backup quarterbacks trying to earn their living analyzing every throw on social media. Rookies, man. They’re up. They’re down. They make special plays. They make dumb plays.

What do we hope for? That there are more ups than downs. That the special outweighs the dumb. That by the end of this campaign the organization is confident this is the guy. It’s not an exciting approach but it’s only prudent way to approach rookies playing this position.

Lumet I: The Group Theater

Relevant Books:

• The Fervent Years by Harold Clurman
• Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931-1940 by Wendy Smith
• Waiting for Lefty by Clifford Odets
• The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act by Isaac Butler

Summary:

• From the East Hampton Star, in a piece about the 2015 documentary By Sidney Lumet: “Lumet mentions that he was often criticized for not having a thematic line in his work and for doing many different kinds of movies. “It’s nonsense,” he said. “There is always a bedrock concern: Is it fair?”
• Lumet was the son of Baruch Lumet, a popular actor in the New York City Yiddish Theater, and Sidney was an incredibly successful young actor on Broadway. But it’s his connection with the Group Theater that provides the foundations of his ideological preoccupations as a filmmaker.
• The Group Theater was founded by Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg as a response to what they saw as an exceedingly commercial and unserious theater scene in and around the crash of the stock market in 1929. Their intention was to do work that mattered, and they would reflect on their stages the struggles of those aimlessly wandering on the NYC streets outside. This intentionality, this political purpose, defines the career of Lumet as he consistently grapples with the social peril of the moment, constantly challenging institutional authority.
• The Group gave theatrical life to the work of Clifford Odets, and the early stage plays of William Saroyan. Their company members would forge a cinematic political legacy that included the works of Elia Kazan (On the Waterfront), Martin Ritt (Hud, Norma Rae), and John Garfield’s anti-McCarthy film productions under the Enterprise label (Force of Evil, The Breaking Point). The political legacy of American cinema is born on the stages of The Group.
• The Group’s most famous moment comes in the closing lines of Waiting for Lefty. When the play’s maligned cab drivers stepped to the front of the stage to yell “Strike!” they were greeted with an audience in solidarity. It has been widely reported that each performance of Lefty included an audience joining those pro-worker cheers, so much that those passing by the Longacre worried there was a riot taking place inside.
• Stanislavsky’s “method” acting approach was brought to New York by the founding members of this company after visits to meet the master in Russia; thus, their reach expands to the greatest American actors of the 20th Century: Pacino, DeNiro, Newman, Brando, etc. (We’ll discuss Lumet’s issues with the method in the auteur section later.)
• The Group failed for many reasons, but the essential one was financial. These were the days before the non-profit theater model. Companies either sold tickets or perished. The Group didn’t sell enough tickets, but their legacy remains. (Turns out people wanted, in the years of the Depression, to be distracted by the stage, not reminded of the tears at the fabric of American society.)

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I wish I had more to say, but I can surmise my thoughts on yesterday’s game in one short sentence: in September, it doesn’t matter how you do it… all that matters is that you did it.

Come November or December, nobody will talk about whether Caleb played well against Tennessee or how many snaps Velus Jones got at RB. All that will matter is that Chicago won the game, and because they did they’ll likely have a reasonable chance at the first Chicago playoff spot since 2020. But, it’s Week 1 — I’m getting ahead of myself.

For now, soak in the fun that comes from a Victory Monday. Given what the team had to persevere through to earn this one, it feels especially sweet.

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We’re so close to real football, you can almost taste it.

Also, if you’re looking for a review of the last game (and Darrell Taylor) look no further:

There is a selflessness to being a sports fan.

For a few hours each week, I allow my emotional existence to be impacted by a collection of individuals with whom I have zero personal connection. They don’t know me. They don’t care about me. To paraphrase a great Jerry Seinfeld bit, the only thing linking us is the laundry the fellas wear.

But emotions are only involved when there are expectations, and it’s been five years since I’ve had any expectations when it comes to the Chicago Bears. After sitting in the building and watching Cody Parkey shank away the 2018 season, Noah and I drowned our grief at the Lou Malnati’s bar. There was immense sadness, but that sadness was accompanied by hope. 2018 was a site to build upon, and 2019 would be the erection of a championship tower. I predicted the 2019 Bears to go to the Super Bowl, but Mitch Trubisky had other plans. (Those plans, it would turn out, were that he would play the quarterback position badly.)

Ryan Poles made two moves over this last week, trading for a pair of defensive linemen in Darrell Taylor and Chris Williams. To the outside observer, these would be considered minor moves, depth moves, backend of the roster stuff. But they struck me, symbolically, as the moves of a GM who thinks his roster is close to competing for a title. And I happen to think he’s right. The 2024 Bears have a terrific defense and the best collection of “skill” players in organization history. This is a team that should win double-digit games and be in the tournament come January. And one has to look no further than last year’s NFC playoffs to understand that every team in the tournament has a prime opportunity to play on the final Sunday.

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Check this out — recorded right after Bears-Bengals joint practices yesterday. Talk about an exciting takeaway.

Two takeaways in two minutes after watching the entire #Bengals practice in Chicago.

1) The obvious became more obvious.

2) Was it good Bears or bad Bengals? pic.twitter.com/CWBdM2RSjJ

— Jeremy Rauch (@FOX19Jeremy) August 15, 2024

Your Turn: What are you looking for from today’s joint practice session with Cincinnati?