Explosive Report Rocks Bears at Worst Possible Time
The Chicago Bears didn’t need any drama before their big Ben Johnson reveal on September 8th.
An explosive report just showed up at the Bears’ doorstep at the worst possible time, raising serious questions about the team’s direction and leadership.
But drama they got.
GoLongTD‘s Tyler Dunne published a scathing account of Bears quarterback Caleb Williams‘ rookie season, along with shedding light on Chicago’s questionable 2024 draft process.
The timing? Vicious.
A Damaging Report Hits Bears Fans Hard
Bears fans were minding their business, and then Tyler Dunne entered their orbit.
Tyler Dunne Claims Caleb Williams Was Mostly at Fault for Poor 2024 Season
The Bears fired head coach Matt Eberflus last November, a much-anticipated termination because most fans soured on him the season prior. Accordingly, most NFL media and Bears faithful were happy to scapegoat Eberflus as the franchise’s scourge, refusing to believe that Caleb Williams could be at fault.
Dunne disagreed.
He explained, “Williams verbalized the call in the huddle, it was wrong half the time, and then players would be lined up wrong all over the field. Verbiage was truncated. Huddling was minimized. The playbook, dumbed down.”
“The Bears offense devolved into an exercise of trial and error to fit whatever the USC rookie demanded. All of which would’ve been manageable if Williams was willing to work. He was not. For all the talk about wanting to be great, this new quarterback didn’t seem to have the desire.”
And that’s just a small excerpt from Dunne’s piece. The lengthy article accuses Williams of aloof behavior and generalized carelessness.
Dunne added, “When he wasn’t storming away from a coach, he was telling veteran wide receivers how to run their routes before taking a game rep himself. In the meeting room, he barely said a word and didn’t pay attention. Coaches often caught Williams on the wrong page of the gameplan completely. He blew off film sessions and lifts. Chicago made him a captain. Games began. Chaos reigned.”
Absolutely Brutal Timing
Of course, the timing couldn’t be worse.
The Bears will kick off their season on Monday night, and until the Dunne reporting, Chicago embarked on a favorite pastime: summer optimism. Some have picked the Bears to reach the postseason, much like the Justin Fields years, when many of the team’s loyalists claimed that Fields was on the verge of an MVP breakout campaign.
Every summer, Chicago has a grand plan to win a playoff game for the first time in a decade and a half, and something later goes wrong — usually many things.
This time, the summer was spoiled by investigative reporting.
Bears Fans Cry Conspiracy
Predictably, a healthy faction of Bears fans wanted nothing to do with Dunne’s work, calling it fake news, a “hit piece,” and overall propaganda. Check any segment of social media, and you find Bears loyalists trashing the article because it is counterproductive to the optimism of the Ben Johnson era as head coach.
Also remember — Dunne doesn’t write fiction. The article is well-sourced, and Dunne’s track record does not involve nefarious, just-for-fun slander.
Meanwhile, the Vikings Play CHI on MNF
Now: the Vikings angle. Minnesota will take on Chicago at Soldier Field on Monday night, both teams’ first game of 2025.
The Bears will have Johnson on the sidelines for the first time, while Williams will attempt to deconstruct the narrative borne by Dunne.
Moreover, J.J. McCarthy will lead Minnesota in his first-ever start, and ironically, McCarthy is a passer that Chicago could’ve drafted if it did its homework in 2024 and didn’t want Williams when it was all said and done.
Storylines galore.
More from Dunne
Dunne, in the first part of his piece, didn’t let up.
He wrote: “When it was time to discuss Williams, the tenor in the room changed drastically. His film was massaged in a manner to present the USC quarterback at his absolute best. Nobody dared to chuckle. The Bears didn’t dissect his wretched performance against Notre Dame on tape, only discussing that three-interception, 48-20 defeat through rose-colored glasses. No magnifying glass was panned over this quarterback’s flaws.”
The reporting suggested that Chicago’s scouting process was a sham, with leaders intentionally highlighting the negative aspects of North Carolina quarterback Drake Maye’s college film.
On Maye, one source told Dunne: “They made fun of him. … They laughed. The GM laughed Drake Maye off the screen, and cut the tape off.”
The team allegedly used a similar process to rule out LSU’s Jayden Daniels, who won the Offensive Rookie of the Year award and guided the Washington Commanders to the 2024 NFC Championship.
One scout told Dunne, “The quarterback process? I would not even call it a process. The Caleb Williams draft pick was the most embarrassing lack of a process — a fair, impartial process to scouting — that I’ve ever seen in my life. There wasn’t any type of actual comparison on a fair slate to which quarterback is actually better. They had it all lined up. It was a rigged trial.”
Just a debacle.
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