Do you smell it in the air?
It’s almost tangible at this point.
The Chicago Bears are close. They are really close.
The Chicago Bears are thisclose to putting it all together.
Let’s look at what we’ve seen
this season. We’ve seen the Chicago Bears defense step up, like they did for about 55 of 60 minutes of the game against the New Orleans Saints.
We’ve seen the offensive line come together. With that, we’ve seen the running game starting to churn the way a Ben Johnson running game should churn.
We’ve seen Caleb Williams play lights out in a game. We’ve seen Caleb Williams come up big when it matters.
We’ve seen moments where the Bears avoided making mistakes, and we’ve seen moments where the Bears took advantage of their opponents’ mistakes. We’ve seen the Bears overcome poor officiating.
We’ve seen it all.
We just haven’t seen it all at the same time.
I’m not sure when that’s going to happen. It could happen this week against Baltimore. Perhaps it still takes a few weeks. Perhaps it doesn’t happen until next year. But you can feel it, it’s going to happen.
Let’s take a minute to talk about Dennis Allen’s defense.
This is what we thought it would be, was it not?
The defense was aggressive, it was creative, it was truly Dennis Allen. Think about this, the Bears had 4 sacks, only one came from a defensive lineman. They had 7 QB hits; only 3 came from the defensive line.
We’ve talked about how this defensive line is going to continue to struggle trying to get pressure with four, and Dennis Allen got creative with blitzes and twists, and we saw things open up when he brought guys from the back seven.
The turnovers aren’t sustainable, but while they are taking place, let’s just enjoy them. The Bears are attacking the ball, and it’s working right now.
On offense, who is this running back wearing the D’Andre Swift jersey? He’s been absolutely incredible and looking like a Pro Bowler. Look, we know Swift has his limitations. He’s never going to be a dominant runner between the tackles, and he’s never going to have incredible vision that will wow you. But when the offensive line is blocking like it currently is, Swift hits the holes so quickly and is running with force north and south right now that it’s just really working.
Caleb Williams? No doubt right now, he’s struggling. His last two performances haven’t been good. The Bears have played six games so far. If we are being tough on Caleb, what kind of grades would we give him? I would give poor grades against Minnesota, New Orleans, and Washington. I would give him a meh grade against Detroit. I would give him a good grade against Las Vegas, and I would give him an outstanding grade against Dallas.
I don’t bring up those performances to say that we should be concerned about Caleb Williams. I bring them up to say that based on the growth we’ve seen with Caleb within the body of the game and how he’s working with Ben Johnson, we should still have confidence that this is going to come together for Caleb with how Ben is working with him and teaching him.
But the Bears are 4-2. It may not be perfect, but the team and the culture are winning games right now. They’ve won four straight, and they’ve done it with two subpar performances from their quarterback.
You can just feel how close it is.
The question is, when it comes together, just how good can this team be?
