What Caleb Williams & the Bears Proved in Their Huge MNF Win vs the Seahawks

On Overreaction Monday, Chris threw out one last take: if the Bears beat the Seahawks on Monday Night Football, they should be talked about as the team to beat in the NFC. Rich shrugged it off at the time. He needed to see Monday night first.

Now he has seen it. Are the Bears a Super Bowl contender? Rich wrote down his answer before the show. "Yes, I wrote down yes," he said.

"The Bears showed up to Seattle in a mood," Rich said. "That's what you need in this league." They were all over Sam Darnold early, with their new "monster of the Midway," Jeffery Simmons, leading the charge.

The context made it bigger. Just eight days earlier, in that same stadium, the defending Super Bowl champion Seahawks erased the undefeated Chiefs, holding Patrick Mahomes to 165 passing yards and zero red zone possessions. So the whole country pulled up a chair to see what Chicago would do against that "dark side" defense.

What Chicago did was march 80 yards on a 17-play, 8 minute and 32 second opening drive, with Caleb Williams picking the defense apart and Ben Johnson dialing it up. The finish was what got Rich. After a three-yard run by Roschon Johnson to the Seattle one, the Bears rushed to the line as if to run the same play again. Ben Johnson was shown on the sideline barking at his team to go fast. As Peyton Manning pointed out on the ManningCast, it was all a charade. Williams rolled out and found Luther Burden for the touchdown. "You come in with a plan," Rich said. "How to attack this defense with your own trickery."

It was 13-9 at the half after Darnold finally found Jaxon Smith-Njigba wide open for a touchdown, though Seattle missed the extra point. The Bears then went 69 yards on 10 plays to go up 20-9. "Good lord is Caleb Williams deadly accurate," Rich said.

Seattle fought back. The Seahawks finally sacked Williams, then Colston Loveland coughed one up, and in a night game in that building, "it is a frenzy and you cannot stop that train." A Cooper Kupp touchdown and a two-point conversion made it a three-point game.

Then Seattle started making mistakes, including a late hit out of bounds on the kickoff that handed Chicago great field position. The Bears also got lucky. A third down run lost three or four yards but was wiped out by a delay of game penalty, giving Johnson another crack at third and nine. Troy Aikman called it the best thing that could have happened to Chicago. Johnson dialed up a throw behind the line of scrimmage to Burden, who went 39 yards to set up a DeAndre Swift touchdown. Swift added another, his third of the night, and the Bears left Seattle "just like Seattle left Kansas City, looking exposed."

The difference from the Chiefs game was protection. Seattle's four-man rush had been all over Mahomes, but the Bears kept Williams clean for much of the night, helped by how fast he gets rid of the ball and how often Johnson has the Bears in the right play.

Johnson downplayed any statement. "I think you find out more about your identity as a team when you get put in those situations," he said. "We didn't come here to make a statement. We're still building."

Rich could not stop gushing about Williams. He became the first quarterback this season to throw for over 200 yards against this Seattle defense. It was his third game this year with a 70% completion percentage, after zero such games last year. His 70.9% completion percentage ranks second in the NFL, behind only JJ McCarthy, who has made one start. When he is not pressured, he is completing 86%. "That confidence that he has, it just oozes out of him into every pore of anybody playing with him," Rich said.

Williams described the role he wants. "I like to say I'm one of those guys that, when we need a play, when we need some energy, when we need anything, I want to be there and I want to be that guy," he said.

The Bears have scored 30 or more points in three straight games since Williams returned from a hamstring injury, the first time they have done that this decade. Johnson called it "one of the more elaborate game plans" they have asked of him, and praised him for staying "calm, cool, and collected" despite crowd noise causing delays and false starts. Rich's verdict: "The Iceman."

Johnson can say they are still building. Rich laid out how it sounds anyway. The Bears beat both Super Bowl 60 teams in back-to-back weeks, New England last week and Seattle on Monday. And for the second straight year, they went into the home of the defending champs and whipped them, after doing it to Philadelphia the day after Thanksgiving last year.