The Bears quarterback had his best game as a pro on Sunday. Plus, Stephen Gilmore is not surprised by the Vikings’ 5–0 start, Aaron Rodgers needs Davante Adams and more.
What a fun, entertaining Week 5. We’re ready to roll with the takeaways to recap it all, morning to night …Tucked into that fact is this—the Chicago Bears had a good enough team over the first month of the season to allow him the time to get there. In Week 1, it was a pick-six and a score on a blocked punt doing the job for Chicago. In dropping their next two games, the coaching staff never panicked and asked too much of its quarterback.
This is a different Bears team, for sure. Eberflus told me the turning point, as he saw it, came this week last year—when Chicago won in Washington, 40–20, on a Thursday night in Week 5 to stem the tide of an 0–4 start. Since then, the Bears are 10–8, with three different quarterbacks registering multiple wins as through that 18-game stretch.
The interesting thing, though, is how most of the progress was shown in the stuff he isn’t known for—operating on schedule and in rhythm within the offense. Both of his touchdown throws, in fact, to DJ Moore were examples of it, downfield throws from the pocket, the first one a 34-yarder in the first quarter, and the second a 30-yarder in the second quarter.
• The 30-yarder also highlighted a more patient Williams in the pocket. The difference with this one, in what it proved, was how quickly he got to Moore in reading the coverage, with Keenan Allen and Rome Odunze, in Waldron’s words “1A and 1B” on the front side of Williams’s progression. You saw it against the Cincinnati Bengals in Week 3. The Arizona Cardinals did a good job defending it last week. That may have lulled the Cleveland Browns into a false sense of security in defending Daniels & Co. on Sunday.
"I didn’t anticipate him coming in and hitting the ground running like that,” McLaurin says. “I’ve played with a few quarterbacks and definitely a few rookie quarterbacks. Sometimes it takes some time to get comfortable in the NFL system, not just at practice. Then you go to a game and it’s a different animal. What’s always encouraged me about him is his ability to get better every day in practice.
“It doesn’t surprise me because I think that we just play together, unselfishly,” he says. “We don’t care who makes the plays. We just want someone to make the plays each down. It’s just unselfish guys playing with each other.” The Vikings got the win, and the defense had another feather in its cap. And Flores—who was a huge draw for Gilmore, since Gilmore won a title with him in New England—had another piece of evidence for the difference he’s making for a team that Kevin O’Connell has pulling every lever to pull out wins.
There’s no question that the franchise is all in to win now. They have aging players in key spots across the roster. They have really good talent on rookie contracts who are going to need second contracts very soon. They, of course, have a 40-year-old quarterback. So this group probably has a max of two shots at this, counting this season as the first one .
This is something I thought about in the immediate aftermath of Atlanta’s scintillating 36–30 comeback win over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. I recalled what I’d heard about Kirk Cousins’s start from people on the ground in the days leading up to this particular showdown.
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