A new era is underway for the Chicago Bears — but the Week 1 result looked awfully familiar as coach Ben Johnson’s team couldn’t maintain an 11-point fourth-quarter lead and lost 27-24 to the Minnesota Vikings.

The second-half issues were across the board in all three phases, including quarterback Caleb Williams missing several open receivers and an inability both to run the ball effectively and stop the run. The Tribune’s Brad Biggs takes a deeper look in his weekly Bears mailbag.

Caleb Williams’ accuracy issues were alarming. Can this issue be corrected? Kurt Warner reviewed his performance and said he had a pretty good game. The eye test and most other analysts don’t seem to agree. How do you assess his performance and can those flaws be corrected? — @gp1127

There’s a lot to unpack here and I have no doubt there will be weekly questions asking for a definitive judgment regarding the quarterback. The spotlight is on Williams, as it should be, considering he was the No. 1 draft pick a year ago. His rookie season didn’t go as well as anyone would have wanted — for myriad reasons — and there’s a lot of ground to gain to reach the level that Jayden Daniels was at in 2024 for the Washington Commanders.

Like it or not, Williams’ development is the biggest issue for the franchise this season. In a bottom-line business, I think it’s both fair and accurate to say his growth is more important than wins and losses this season. If the Bears go 7-10 or even 6-11, but you can sense Williams is really settling in, playing consistently and within the structure of the system while also making the tremendous plays off-script like few can do, that’s not going to be a bad thing. For the long-term health of the franchise, that would be better than a 10-7 season where the Bears are winning a bunch of games 20-17 because they’re playing good defense and limiting turnovers and Williams remains inconsistent.

I respectfully disagree with Hall of Famer Kurt Warner and, yes, I saw his breakdown. I don’t know of any other analysts who saw Williams’ performance (21 of 35 for 210 yards and one touchdown) in a great light when considering the entire game. He completed his first 10 passes and was in a groove where you were probably thinking, OK, here he goes. He’s warmed up and locked in. It went south from there. He was frenetic in the pocket. He was quick to bail on occasion. He rushed throws. He turned down open opportunities for some big plays. The accuracy went from great to bad, especially in some crucial moments and near the red zone. Those are all elements that plagued his game last season.

According to the NFL’s NextGenStats, his completion percentage above expectation was minus-13.2%, tied with Tampa Bay’s Baker Mayfield for the worst in Week 1.

“It’s frustrating because like I said after the game, you did everything up to that point right and then you miss a pass,” Williams said. “And it’s frustrating. That’s something that we practice on, something that we get after and something that I’m going to keep getting after, keep correcting. Passes that I feel that I typically don’t miss in those moments and situations, especially with some of the passes being what they were and how wide open. You miss and you move on. You correct and you find ways to get better.”

We saw instances where the ball was on time, especially early in the game and it was fluid. But there were too many plays when it looked like he was rushing. It would be like listening to a podcast on 1 1/2 times speed. Too much was hurried when it didn’t need to be. When the footwork is off, the ball can spray all over the place. Think about what Aaron Rodgers looks like when he’s smoothly throwing the ball. Or Jalen Hurts. Or Josh Allen. Or Jayden Daniels a lot of the time. It’s calm and it’s that way over and over.

“There was a lot of good that came out of it,” Ben Johnson said Wednesday. “When he was doing it (footwork) properly, the ball came out on time and I thought he was delivering accurate footballs. But it’s still not 100% all the time and that’s something that we’re working through.”

There’s an element here where Williams can be highly successful if he’s almost a point guard. The Bears have some really talented skill position players who just need opportunities to have the ball in their hands so they can create and pick up the yards after catch. The challenge is blending that into his game with the stuff that makes Williams rare and special. He can make tremendous athletic and off-platform plays with the ability to fire missiles 30-plus yards across his body while running full speed. He’s got a unique talent. He needs to be able to win from the pocket and play at a higher level within the structure of the offense. It’s been one game in a new system with a new coaching staff.

Let’s see how he looks when the Bears are five or six games into the season. That’s a good checkpoint. Everyone wants to rush to plant their flag and make definitive statements about the Bears quarterback — Williams or the many who came before him. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched an underwhelming offensive practice in training camp and there have been folks declaring the offense has turned the corner and everything is looking up. Reality is, they didn’t even reach the corner to make a turn.

There’s an immense amount of pressure on young quarterbacks and they require an incredible amount of support from within the building and teammates to excel. Yes, his flaws can be corrected, but it’s going to take time and it’s going to require patience. Let’s see how he looks when he’s had more time on task and more games under his belt playing for Johnson.

Johnson emphasized the positives and Williams played turnover-free ball. He hurt the Vikings running the ball and Minnesota safety Josh Metellus said he looked faster than he was last season. There are 16 more regular-season games and Williams didn’t seem fazed on Wednesday.

“Some of it is just trusting and believing,” he said. “That’s the biggest part of it is being able to trust Coach Johnson and trust my teammates and things like that and keep doing what I was doing in the first half: Take what the defense gives me and moving the ball down the field and being decisive. There was a lot of positive that came out of that.

“Obviously, we had negatives. Within that game, kind of how Coach Johnson said, we had more negative plays than they did and we lost the game. It’s being able to find those moments where maybe a drive goes bad and it’s being able to find those ways to come back together and go out the next drive and be efficient and do what we did in the first half.”

What went wrong with the run game against Minnesota? Was it D’Andre Swift not making the right reads, bad run blocking, a lack of commitment to it or some combination of all? It’s hard to imagine getting any traction in play action if teams don’t have to worry about the run. — @john_f_howard

Bears running back D’Andre Swift makes a move in the first quarter against the Vikings on Monday, Sept. 8, 2025, at Soldier Field. (Chris Sweda/Chicago Tribune)

The first thing coaches will tell you is, believe it or not, you don’t need a highly efficient running game to have a successful play-action passing game. I know that’s a little counterintuitive, but what makes play action work is the threat of the run. Sure, if an offense is really successful running the ball, it will aid the play-action game, but it’s not mandatory.

The Vikings were really good against the run in 2024, allowing only 93.4 yards per game. The Detroit Lions had one of the few offenses that ran the ball really well versus Minnesota last season as Jahmyr Gibbs had 116 and 139 yards in the two meetings. That was the Lions offense; this year’s Bears offense is a different unit.

The Bears ran for 119 yards Monday, but that figure was propped up by the legs of Caleb Williams, who gained 58 yards on six carries. He did a really nice job of eluding some rushes and then finding open field — a lot of it — with three gains of 12 or more yards.

Swift finished with 53 yards on 17 carries (3.1 per carry). He had more attempts in only four games last year, so the commitment to the ground game was there. The offense just didn’t get the creases needed at the point of attack, and there wasn’t a lot of room for natural cutback lanes.

Some of it was operational. Some of it was the Bears losing the battle up front.

“I would start with this: That was a top-five run defense from a year ago,” Ben Johnson said. “And in their opinion, they improved their front. So it’s hard to start with. You’ve got to give them some credit.

“With that being said, we anticipated being on the same page more than what we were. There were some times that, when we made the Mike (middle linebacker) point, we weren’t all on the same page. That’s a little bit (of) time on task. That’s also a multiplicity of fronts we were seeing this particular week. (Vikings defensive coordinator Brian Flores) makes it very difficult. But we’ve all got to be on the same page.

“The sooner that we can grow as a unit, it’s five guys all playing as one, and if you include the tight ends, it’s six or seven as a part of it as well. I thought Swift ran hard when the ball was in his hands. There’s probably a couple reads where he could’ve hit it maybe a little different, but for the most part I was pretty pleased with how he played.”

Week 1 photos: Minnesota Vikings 27, Chicago Bears 24

How much of the offensive line struggles are due to Caleb Williams’ failure to correctly call out pre-snap protections? How much is due to having three new players on the line and the entire team learning a new system and no one has had enough time to develop chemistry yet? — @michaelinmi

It’s probably a little bit of everything, plus the fact the Bears were going against an experienced, talented defense run by a very calculating coordinator in Brian Flores. The Bears were frustrated they weren’t able to use pre-snap cadence better, and issues there contributed to some of the four false starts.

“I guess silent cadence, right?” Ben Johnson said Monday. “Maybe that’ll help this week. We’re going to need to be really good at that because this is going to be a loud environment that we’re going to (in Detroit). It’s going to be a playoff-like atmosphere. Ford Field has been something else over the last couple of years, so we’re going to have to be at our best.

“Certainly we haven’t been good enough over the course of camp. We haven’t been good Week 1, and so this is going to be a huge point of emphasis for us going forward.”

Was the Darnell Wright holding call technically a correct call? — @ccall1331

Of all the calls that went against the Bears, that’s the one I’d point to that the officials got wrong. Wright basically swiped down on Jalen Redmond’s arms and used his momentum to push him to the ground. I thought it was a bad call — and certainly a costly one in a series of downs in which the Bears went from first-and-10 at the Vikings 24-yard line to missing a 50-yard field goal.

I wonder if the official thought Wright briefly got his left hand inside the top of Redmond’s jersey. That’s the only way it was a hold, in my opinion. Wright threw up his right arm at the end of the play as if to signal: No foul here. If you’re not guilty, don’t act like there’s something to look at.

It wouldn’t surprise me if the Bears submitted the play to the league for an evaluation. It won’t do them any good if the NFL agrees it was a bogus call. But it looked like a clean block to me.

What to know about the Chicago Bears’ possible move to suburban Arlington Heights

As an “old school” football fan, should I just get used to the idea that you go for it on fourth-and-3 when you’re in field-goal range? — @jjbittenbi10623

A ton of factors go into fourth-down decisions, but in this scenario, it was a clear go.

The Bears led 7-3 with 8:59 remaining in the second quarter. The Vikings had done next to nothing offensively to that point. The only traction they had gotten came as a result of a 42-yard pass-interference penalty against Nahshon Wright. Any fourth-down model you look at would tell you this is an obvious go-for-it situation.

Ben Johnson is very analytically driven, and in a profile from back in February that might be worth your time, I detailed how he did an offseason study on the math behind punt-or-not decisions when he was a Miami Dolphins assistant on Joe Philbin’s staff.

“He’s 1,000 times smarter that way than any of us in the room on this, and he’s left-handed (although Johnson throws a football and eats with his right hand) and writes funny,” said Cincinnati Bengals coach Zac Taylor, who was also an assistant in Miami at the time. “It’s all these traits that I see these Sean McVay-type guys have, these left-handed, write-funny, brain-thinks-differently guys, and it was a spectacular presentation. Dead on.”

The problem Monday wasn’t the decision or the play call. It was the execution. DJ Moore was open and Caleb Williams’ pass, with a lot of zip on it, sailed wide of the mark. I’d get comfortable with the idea of Johnson being aggressive on fourth down, especially on the plus side of the field.

Where was the defensive line all game? Heard very little about Grady Jarrett, Andrew Billings, Gervon Dexter, etc. — @pleasantcollec2

Bears defensive tackle Gervon Dexter Sr. (99) celebrates after tackling Vikings running back Jordan Mason during the third quarter Monday, Sept. 8, 2025, at Soldier Field. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)

I thought the defensive line was pretty good through three quarters. There was consistent pressure on J.J. McCarthy early in the game. The Bears got three sacks, and Tremaine Edmunds, Montez Sweat and Dayo Odeyingbo each had a pass deflection at or near the line of scrimmage.

The problem was the Vikings were able to get their ground game going in the fourth quarter. They ran 13 times for 82 yards in the fourth, with Jordan Mason accounting for 56 of those yards. It shouldn’t have been a situation where the line was gassed. The Bears defense was on the field for only 49 snaps in the entire game.

The run defense is a big question. The Bears struggled to stop the run last season, and I think the addition of Jarrett was more to have a disruptive interior player against the pass. This will be something to watch the next few weeks. Had the Bears remained stout in the fourth quarter, they would have been able to put Minnesota away.

When will the Bears trade for another running back? — @kevinwillman

I’d advise against sitting around wondering when that will happen, at least with the current situation. The offense needs to run the ball more effectively, no question. That starts with D’Andre Swift, and Ben Johnson made a point of saying he needs to call more running plays and involve Kyle Monangai.

Monangai played nine snaps Monday (Swift played 54) and didn’t touch the ball.

“We probably were at, what, under 20 for called runs in the game,” Johnson said. “I need to call more so that we get him in the game a little bit more. That’s something EB (running backs coach Eric Bieniemy) and I have talked about, making sure he has more carries going forward.”

Getting RB2 touches is predicated in part by game flow. If the coaching staff decides before the game that the No. 2 back will play the third and fifth series, that’s great. But if it’s three-and-out both times, there isn’t a lot of work for the back and the staff has to adjust to find touches for him. First things first, they need to block better up front, and then Johnson needs to call more runs.

Why wasn’t there more 12 personnel in the Vikings game? — @darkseith

The Bears used a good deal of 12 personnel (one running back, two wide receivers, two tight ends). The offense was on the field for 63 snaps and was in 12 personnel for 25 snaps. At 39.7%, that was the sixth-highest rate in the league in Week 1. The league average was 25.1%.

The Bears were in 11 personnel (one running back, three wide receivers, one tight end) for 27 snaps, which at 42.9% was well below the league average of 60.3%.

Jonah Jackson lost a total of 15 reps in Monday night’s game along with a few costly penalties. Seemed like pressure was consistently getting through the middle of the O-line on passing and running downs. Given the “best man plays” mantra, how short is the leash here? — @_sgoudreau

Bears guard Jonah Jackson (73) and tackle Darnell Wright (58) stand on the field during a break in the action in the second quarter against the Minnesota Vikings on Monday, Sept. 8, 2025, at Soldier Field. (Chris Sweda/Chicago Tribune)

I don’t know about Jackson losing an exact count of 15 plays. Evaluating offensive line play is highly subjective, especially when you don’t know what the specific blocking assignment is on each play. What I do know is Jackson didn’t have a good game, and he acknowledged as much afterward.

“We just have to be better,” he said. “We can’t have self-inflicted wounds and things like that. It starts with me.”

The Vikings didn’t blitz as much as the Bears expected, especially in the first half. That’s because they didn’t have to. Defensive tackles Javon Hargrave and Jonathan Allen were really strong in their Vikings debuts. Hargrave had seven quarterback hurries and two sacks, and Allen added five hurries. The Bears had issues blocking them, especially one-on-one. That falls on the front as a whole, not just Jackson.

If you’re putting faith in Ben Johnson as a coach and evaluator, you’re probably comfortable with Jackson being a good right guard. He needs to be because not only did the Bears trade a sixth-round pick to the Los Angeles Rams for him, they adjusted his contract. He’s earning $17.5 million this season, and $7 million of the $13.5 million he’s due in 2026 (he can earn more with escalators tied to playing time and qualifying for the playoffs) is fully guaranteed.

The Bears had issues with cadence that added to the struggles at the line of scrimmage, and it’s going to take some time for the five linemen to get accustomed to working with each other and the subtle yet important communication measures that take place on every snap. I’d be looking at the idea of continuity up front for everyone — Caleb Williams included — and not the possibility of swapping out offensive linemen after one game.

Had the Bears kicked the ball out of bounds with 2:02 left in the game instead of trying to kick through the end zone, could the Vikings have either declined the penalty to have the Bears rekick or could they have accepted a 5-yard penalty and had the Bears kick again from the 30, making it even harder to kick through the end zone? — Paul G., Florida

No. Had the Bears kicked the ball out of bounds, the Vikings would have taken possession on their 40-yard line. Had the Bears achieved the touchback they were seeking, Minnesota would have started on its 35.

“I felt like we could kick it out of the back (of the end zone),” Ben Johnson said Monday. “We weren’t able to get that done. In hindsight, I should’ve kicked it out of bounds.”

What was the most frustrating thing you saw Monday that makes you believe nothing will change? Was there anything you saw Monday that made you have optimism for the season? — @ntag65567

The most frustrating element of the loss to the Vikings was the Bears had a 17-6 lead entering the fourth quarter, and all three phases contributed to the defeat. That’s the worst part about the loss. If you could pin it on only the offense, defense or special teams, at least you would feel like the issue was more centralized. The Bears have to learn how to win, and that’s across the board. They outplayed Minnesota for 45 minutes and wound up with the kind of “here we go again” result that is understandably maddening.

Related Articles

Caleb Williams on what worked and what didn’t in Week 1, and how the Chicago Bears can adjust moving forward

What to know about the Chicago Bears’ possible move to suburban Arlington Heights

5 pressing questions facing Chicago Bears after Week 1 loss, including where did Caleb Williams’ accuracy go?

Chicago Bears’ Ben Johnson sees a lot to ‘clean up’ from Week 1 loss — including his own coaching

How have the Chicago Bears fared in every home opener in team history? Here’s a look back at each one since 1920.

I’m not in the camp that believes nothing will change because it’s a mistake to draw sweeping conclusions from Week 1. I’d be encouraged by moments in which you saw a wide variety of playmakers contributing to offensive production. When the Bears iron out some things on offense, they have a surplus of skill-position weapons. I’d be encouraged by the play of left tackle Braxton Jones. It’s just one week, but things were mighty quiet for him coming out of the game and folks were plenty concerned about that position. I’d be encouraged by right tackle Darnell Wright, especially considering the holding call on him was very iffy — at most. Defensive end Dayo Odeyingbo made an impact.

The Bears had a bad loss, no way around that. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be optimistic that things will begin to take shape over the next two months. Remember, the coaches are learning a lot about the players — and vice versa — in the beginning of the season with a new staff in place.

Why do they insist on suckering us in just to punch us in the stomach? And will we ever learn? — @jerrytoufi

Some folks probably have been guilty of unrealistic expectations for this team for some time. You have to go back to the start of the 2019 season to be able to point to record and performance in the previous year as justification for belief. I thought they would be a heck of a lot better in 2019 than they proved to be.

Since then, a lot of the hope and predictions have hinged on change. Coaching changes were made. Coordinators were replaced. The reality is those ex-coaches weren’t the root of everything that ailed the organization.

I believe the Bears will be better than they were a season ago. A dispiriting loss in the opener doesn’t change my opinion. Sure, the way the Bears frittered away an 11-point lead in the fourth quarter had a lot of elements you were accustomed to seeing with previous teams. It’s one game, and overreacting now only will lead to a bigger swing of emotions when the team does put together a strong 60-minute showing.

That’s part of being a fan. My best advice is to find a way to temper expectations throughout the offseason when you find yourself supporting your beliefs based on more change than on actual on-field performance. At some point, you have to see it to believe it, right? There’s a good chance there will be elements of this season in which you will see the needed improvement.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/09/11/chicago-bears-mailbag-caleb-williams-dandre-swift/