On his latest Bears Banter podcast, Bill Zimmerman was joined by long-time Chicago Bears analyst Dan Durkin, and he shared some takeaways about what he’s seen from Caleb Williams and the Bears offense through a couple of weeks of camp. Caleb’s flash plays in Buffalo has been the talk of the national media, but Durkin was just as impressed by the intangibles he saw against the Bills.
“You look at just the general operation of how he ran the offense there's a lot of encouraging signs from him,” Durkin said on our latest podcast. “You saw the silly arm strength on the rollout that he hit with Cole Kmet. But this is how I look at it, there’s some finer points too…”
“I look at the MIKE point that he had in his first completion of the game. So, what is he doing right there? He’s making sure he’s on the same page with his offensive line to say, ‘Hey, you need to block that middle linebacker over to the right, that’s where I want the protection to go because I’m kind of concerned about with what this look is.’ That, to me, is a sign of a mature quarterback who’s able to identify what he sees in the front and where is he a little uncomfortable, and is he on the same page with the center. So, resetting the MIKE point, that’s a mature type of thing.”
Durkin goes on to explain how quickly Williams goes through his progressions, specifically spotlighting the third-down conversion to DJ Moore. He also lauds Caleb’s ability to process both pre- and post-snap.
“You're talking about processing, and that's so important as a quarterback,” Durkin told Bill, “how quickly can you process where to go with the football in under three seconds.”
“It's very complicated when you think about that; you know you have to process a lot of information pre-snap, and then post-snap, the look that you got may not be the same, and so you saw that against the Bills. Kudos to the Bills for actually giving him some disguises, and that's good. That's great teach tape for him, and he actually came out with the right decision on some of those. The scramble that he had, they showed a single high look, they rolled back to two-man now all of a sudden he's getting a middle field closed indicator at the beginning of the snap. The ball snapped, the safety rotates, and now he's like, ‘Hey, this is two-man.’”
Durkin explains that two-man is the coverage that the Packers ran against the ‘Niners and Colin Kaepernick when Kaepernick was able to torch them on the ground.
“If you have everybody's backs turned, and they don't have a spy on him, which the Bills didn't, he reads it he's like, ‘hey nobody's going to be open, they're plastered on the outside, I'm just gonna tuck the ball I'm gonna slide and get a first down.’ That's processing. That's understanding the pre-snap look that I got is not the same as post-snap. What's my adjustment right now– Well, I'm getting doubled here, I'm getting doubled here, there's nobody spying me, I'm going to pick up a first down and get you a fresh set .”
Dan gets more in-depth on Shane Waldron’s offensive scheme, the playmakers on the roster, and shares his concerns about Chicago’s offensive and defensive lines.
It’s a fantastic interview with one of the best Xs&Os analysts in the business, so make sure you listen to Bill’s full podcast in the embed below or wherever you get your audio.
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