Caleb Williams comes to the NFL after a decorated college career at Oklahoma and USC. (Yahoo Sports/Bruno Rouby)
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The excitement for the Chicago Bears is about more than just the arrival of Caleb Williams, though we’ll get to him shortly.
The Bears were pretty good late last season. They started 2-7 and it seemed the only reason Matt Eberflus would survive the rest of the year is the Bears seem weirdly nostalgic about the fact that they’ve never fired a head coach during a season. But the Bears got hot after that and they saved Eberflus’ job in the process. Nobody seemed to pay enough attention to how good the Bears were down the stretch.
The Bears went 5-3 in the second half and the only losses were on the road to playoff teams: at the Lions, at the Browns and at the Packers. All three losses were competitive. The Bears led the Lions and Browns with less than four minutes remaining in each of those games. They lost a competitive 17-9 game to a Packers team playing for a playoff spot in Week 18. At the end of the 2022 season the Lions won a Week 18 game at Green Bay in a similar situation and went into the offseason with a ton of buzz. The Bears’ buzz would have been louder, maybe equal to the 2023 Lions, had they beaten the Packers in the finale. As is, there’s still plenty of excitement for what’s to come in Chicago. The Bears got three prime-time games, a standalone game in London and a matchup against the Lions on Thanksgiving. They’ll be the featured team on HBO’s “Hard Knocks” during training camp.
There wasn’t a lot of hope in Chicago before the second half of last season. It was a slow rebuild with three straight seasons of double-digit losses. Suddenly there was reason for optimism. And one of the best trades…
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Author : Yahoo Sports
Publish date : 2024-07-10 11:38:06
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