Offensive coordinator Shane Waldron is in his first season with the team.
Ashlee Rezin, Chicago Sun-Times
Ask Shane Waldron what jumped out at him on film about Caleb Williams, and the Bears’ offensive coordinator doesn’t point to any of his highlight-reel plays from a Heisman Trophy-winning season.
Instead, he tells you about the last game Williams played — a butt-kicking at the hands of their rivals, UCLA. The Trojans lost the most important game of their season 38-20 and spent most of the second half trailing by no fewer than 15 points.
From the moment the Bruins returned a fumble to go up 18 about five minutes into the third quarter, Williams completed 10-of-15 passes for 125 yards. More importantly, he kept his head up.
“To me, you see the competitor,” Waldron said Saturday before the second of two Bears rookie minicamp practices. “The championship mindset where he’s going to be at his best, no matter the situation around him and keep playing. …
“Everyone is good in the NFL. Every week, you’re playing against great people on defense, great schemes, and so that ability, regardless of what’s going on with the external noise or the situation in a game, play every play as its own individual snap.
“He demonstrated that. Take away all the highlight-highlight reels. That was a good moment.”
In his first year at Halas Hall, it will be Waldron’s job to ensure Williams has more highlights than grind-it-out moments in his rookie season. Both are starting in a good place. Asked what he finds most compelling about Williams’ play, Waldron unknowingly pointed to something that eluded Justin Fields and Mitch Trubisky.
“His arm talent and his ability to put the ball where it needs to be,” he said. “That’s evident from Day 1. Now it’s about keeping the learning and progressing and keep moving forward with our system. The arm talent with what he’s able to do is fun to watch.”
Neither Fields nor Trubisky were instinctual passers. Fields’ arm strength was never questioned — he threw a pretty deep ball — but he was more like the centerfielder trying to throw a runner out at home. Williams plays more like a shortstop, able to make pinpoint throws with his arm at different angles.
Like Trubisky and Fields before him, the Bears are focused on teaching Williams how to speak their language. He had a head start practicing the team’s preferred cadence and footwork because Waldron shared his preferences with Will Hewlett, the quarterback’s private coach, in mid-March.
“The plays, the schemes, those things will happen as we keep building an offense,” Waldron said. “But right now, the core of it, each building in football, you speak so many different languages, and a lot of the words mean the same thing, but you gotta figure out what's our language? What's the language for the 2024 Chicago Bears?”
At the last, it will be an exciting one.
“As he moves forward it’s really more about the operation, building that foundation,” Waldron said.
