Mike Tanier was brought in to address Caleb Williams' various machinations in his first year with the Bears.

Why Your Team Sucks 2025: Chicago Bears:

The Bears were spiraling along at Step 1/Phase 3 late last year when Matt Eberflus—who exhibited all the institutional control of a middle-school substitute teacher who just farted while sneezing—fired offensive coordinator Shane Waldron just weeks before Eberflus himself was axed. The resulting anarchy left rookie Caleb Williams without any guidance, and Williams’s daddy was still driving him to work at that point. Williams endured a league-high 68 sacks, the Bears finished with a non-winning record for the sixth straight year, and owner Virginia Halas McCaskey kicked the bucket in February at age 102, leaving the rest of us to deal with Williams’s V-22 Osprey helicopter father.

... instead of guiding a young quarterback who could be the next Mahomes to further glory in Washington, Johnson gets to teach Williams how to tie his shoelaces.

Only the Bears hire defensive nonentities from .500 teams like Eberflus, or the grouchy old dustfarter who ordered Peyton Manning to kneel out the clock when tied late in the fourth quarter of a playoff game like John Fox, or exiled-to-Canada Bill Walsh stenographers like Marc Trestman. The last time the Bears pursued a certified offensive hotshot, they played sloppy sevenths when raiding the Chiefs’ staff and came away with Matt Nagy, Andy Reid’s once-and-future mac ‘n’ cheese sous chef.

Your quarterback: Whole corporate management seminars exist about how to deal with young employees like Caleb Williams, who has the physical tools of a future All-Pro but the workplace readiness of a newborn marsupial.

Carl Williams, Caleb’s father/agent/enabler/saboteur, follows his son through life like an overprotective Xenomorph guarding its eggs. Carl combines the virtues of the dad who is no longer allowed within 500 feet of a Little League field with the one who shows the prom date toddler photos of his son playing with Mister Wee Wee in the bathtub. Most of the most unflattering tidbits about Caleb’s rookie season come from Carl, who kept tattling on the Bears to author Seth Wickersham in American Kings: A Biography of a Quarterback, which landed in Bears headquarters like a bunker buster before Johnson could even adjust the height of his desk chair.

The Williamses didn’t want poor Caleb to get stuck on the Bears, which is relatable. They thought they could circumvent the NFL draft by playing a year in the UFL, a profoundly stupid thing for two adults who have already navigated the transfer portal and NIL landscape to think. Seriously, believing for even a second that rinky-dink minor-league football was some get-out-of-draft-free card that no one else had ever exploited is almost as dumb as sailing five miles off the coast and declaring that Williams was draft-ineligible according to maritime law.

After Williams’s sovereign-citizen gambit failed, he reported to the Bears, where (per his father, via Wickersham) no one taught him how to watch film. Everyone on the NFL talking-head Boomer-to-Zoomer spectrum from Kurt Warner to Robert Griffin III weighed in on this irresistible morsel of offseason gossip, with opinions ranging from In my day, we watched film uphill in the snow to and from Pop Warner practice to NFL coaches are obligated to tuck rookie quarterbacks in and check under the bed for monsters. Williams later clarified that he knew how to watch film, but needed to learn how to be “more efficient” and find “ways to pick up things better.” Which sounded like he didn’t know how to watch film.

Johnson is now stuck in the role of Mrs. Puff teaching Spongebob how to drive. Per Albert Breer, one of Johnson’s first tasks was improving Williams’s “body language,” which apparently means crawling off the turf after sacks with more enthusiasm. Johnson also spent OTAs assuring fans that Williams not only absolutely loves the Bears but is a 100 percent conscientious and receptive pupil, while Williams reassured fans that his conversations with dad about donning a puddy nose and glasses and playing for the Arlington Renegades were mere “thoughts.” Sounds like things are going great.

The Bears spent their top two draft picks on even more playmakers for Williams, because last year’s hand-picked corps of DJ Moore, Rome Odunze, Keenan Allen, Cole Kmet, and D’Andre Swift—enough firepower to turn Patrick Mahomes into a galactic overlord—did not provide quite enough scaffolding for success.

G Joe Thuney (last seen as one of the Walmart greeters welcoming Eagles defenders into the Chiefs backfield and asking them if they found Mahomes OK).

Williams displayed resilience during a 2024 season when his father must have been tempted to smuggle him over the border to the Saskatchewan Roughriders.

You’re going to get about 800 of these pointing out that Chicago got a pope before the Bears got a 4000 yard passer, but the Bears and Catholic Church aren’t that different.

Both are sclerotic, bloated institutions powered by blind faith and outdated traditions. Both worship the saints of the past, require weekly disappointments on Sunday, and are lead by geriatric doofuses. And somehow both engender unquestioning devotion, but a miracle isn’t coming.

Aaron Rodgers simultaneously falling off a cliff and revealing himself as such a detestable prick that no team wants him is the biggest win I’ve had in years.

The fact that he ever explored trying to avoid being drafted by the Bears proves that he has the highest IQ of any quarterback they’ve had in my lifetime (44 years).