In their final preseason game of 2025 on Friday, the Chicago Bears got a 29-27 victory over the Kansas City Chiefs. Starting quarterback Caleb Williams played a fairly crisp game by completing 11 of his 15 passing attempts and ended up with 113 passing yards, one touchdown pass, 18 rushing yards and no interceptions.
However, Chicago had to earn this victory the hard way. It gave up the first 17 points of the game to the Chiefs and was still down 27-10 when the fourth quarter began.
The team didn’t score its first touchdown until Williams threw a touchdown pass to wide receiver Rome Odunze with 28 seconds left in the first half. It led coach Ben Johnson to publicly call out his squad’s offense.
“It is disappointing to me offensively for sure,” Johnson said, per ESPN. “I thought that we had worked our way out of that.
“If the first quarter was really any indication, it’s not good enough, so we got to get better in a hurry. Good news is we will be able to look at this tape and coach it up with our guys and I think it’s out of our system hopefully for us going into the regular season. We got to make sure that we start faster on offense and on defense.”
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The Bears had defeated the Buffalo Bills 38-0 in their previous preseason game and played to a 24-24 tie against the Miami Dolphins on Aug. 10. But given how much they struggled last season, and given how rough around the edges Williams looked last season, they have plenty of work to do.
In 2024, they went 5-12 and had a 10-game losing streak that cost then-head coach Matt Eberflus his job. Williams, the No. 1 overall pick in last year’s draft out of the University of Southern California, completed just 62.5% of his pass attempts.
He was also sacked an NFL-high 68 times, which caused the organization to fortify the offensive line during the offseason. But it will take more than improved pass protection to send Chicago to the playoffs for just the third time since 2010.
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Chicago was just 28th in points scored and 31st in passing yards, first downs and net yards gained per pass attempt last year. Its running game also struggled to move the chains and ranked 25th in yards and 27th in yards per rushing attempt.
Now that Johnson, who was the Detroit Lions’ offensive coordinator the previous three seasons, is the Bears’ head coach, there is hope that those numbers will improve.
The team’s devoted fans are starving for it to, at the very least, make a deep playoff run sometime soon.
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