When you get the chance to pick the brain of one of the best football minds working in media today, you take it and cram as much into a 35-minute interview as possible. That's exactly what Taylor Doll did in her latest Making Monsters podcast on our 2nd City Gridiron channel when she spoke with Robert Mays, the host of "The Athletic Football Show" and an NFL writer for The Athletic.
Mays dished on a number of Chicago Bears topics, including the receivers, the defensive backs, and the trenches, but his thoughts on rookie quarterback Caleb Williams were especially exciting.
On Caleb Williams
“I think the two things that really stood out just from the physical talent perspective, even just how gifted he is, his awareness and his flexibility as a thrower. When you watch him just toying with defenders in space, and you combine it with what he can do throwing the ball on the run to his right or to his left. He just has a different skill set. He’s a different sort of guy.”
“He has such incredible awareness of where space exists and where defenders are going to be, and if you look at the way he can navigate in the pocket, even some of the stuff he’s doing with pump fakes out in space against guys on boots. That’s just stuff where he has a sense for how the game is played.”
“I think oftentimes if you have a quarterback that’s completing 56 percent of his passes, accuracy is one of the issues that you’re worried about, that is not an issue with the way that this guy plays, and that to me is another kind of misconception about his game. He’s not some wild horse back there, he has really good mechanics.”
“ this Spidey-sense and this awareness of where everyone else is on the field. That’s the type of thing you can’t coach, you can’t teach, and that’s what makes him special.”
On Chicago’s wide receiver corps
“It’s one of the best pass-catching groups in the league, which, as a Bears fan, is a very strange place to be. I think people misunderstand how bad the receiver history is because they’re preoccupied with the quarterback history. We had two years of Alshon Jeffrey and Brandon Marshall, THAT’S IT!”
“What I love about it is they definitely do have complimentary skills sets. They all can do a little bit of everything, and sometimes that would worry me where you have these guys that are maybe a little bit samey in terms of the roles they can play, but I don’t feel that way about this group.”
On the potential of second-year corner Tyrique Stevenson
“Tyrique Stevenson had some impressive flashes last year. That Raiders game I think, was the first game where I was like, ‘Okay, I can work with this!’ he had some moments against Davante Adams that I think really made you kind of open your eyes.”
On expectations for the Bears
“This is not an aging team; this is not a team with a short window. It’s a team that you’d hope has a long runway to make this work”
On the offensive line
“If I’m looking at one area of the offense that is most concerning, it’s center and right guard; I mean even left guard because Teven Jenkins has struggled to stay healthy. At his best, he’s had some really impressive flashes, but this is a guy you want to figure out what he is because you have to figure out a contract decision sooner rather than later.”
It’s a fascinating podcast with plenty more on the defensive back room, the running game, the defensive line, offensive coordinator Shane Waldron, and head coach Matt Eberflus. Mays also discusses his latest podcast, which was his trip around the NFC North.
You can listen to the full podcast here:
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