Last week’s preseason game against the Buffalo Bills marked a spectacular start for the 2025 Chicago Bears. The team witnessed the first taste of game action featuring Caleb Williams under new coach Ben Johnson. In this week’s game, the Bears’ starting unit looked like the Bears’ offense last season. It felt like a step back for this offense; all of the problems of 2024 such as pre-snap penalties and Caleb Williams taking sacks occurred against the Kansas City Chiefs’ starters.
The Chiefs showed they are still that team to beat in the AFC. This new Bears unit was struggling to keep up. In her postgame rankings for the final Bears preseason game of the summer, Alyssa Barbieri of Bears Wire deemed the Bears’ offense a dud on Friday night versus the Chiefs. Here are her thoughts on the starting offense’s performance:
“While the Bears offense had a clean operation in last week’s blowout win over the Bills, but that wasn’t the case against the Chiefs. The same pre-snap issues that have plagued the Bears all summer long reared their ugly head against Kansas City. The first series was a disaster for Chicago, which went botched snap and handoff, false start, throwaway and a completion short of the sticks. It was an ugly start for the Bears offense.”
It was not all struggles for the Bears starting offense. Caleb Williams put together back to back scoring drives to end the second quarter, one of them being a field goal drive against the Chiefs’ starting defense.
The drawback was that the start of the game for the Bears looked too familiar, and we saw rookie Caleb Williams struggling after a performance (against the Bills) we thought shut the door on 2024’s problems.
Caleb Williams redeeming himself and Ben Johnson allowing starters to stay on the field offers some confidence that this Bears offense will get it right. It seems safe to think the 2025 Bears offense will not play 17 games on par with last season. It is still two weeks until the Bears’ matchup against the Vikings in Week 1, but the first quarter against the Chiefs must not shape how this season will play out. The Bears and Caleb have to be better.
This article originally appeared on Trojans Wire: Chicago Bears, Caleb Williams struggle versus Chiefs’ starting defense
