Josh Alper ,
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The Bears won their fifth straight game on Thanksgiving and are at the top of the NFL playoff race with a 9-3 record, but head coach Ben Johnson said that the team is lagging in one significant area.
After Johnson was hired this offseason, he set a goal for quarterback Caleb Williams to complete 70 percent of his passes. Williams has not reached that number in any of the team’s games and he’s completing 58.1 percent of his passes for the season, which is last among the 33 qualified quarterbacks in the league this season.
On Monday, Johnson was asked about Williams’ lack of accuracy in a press conference. He acknowledged that it was a blustery day in Philadelphia last Thursday, but that it is “an area that we are certainly talking about” with the quarterback and everyone else on the offense.
“We gotta fundamentally be correct,” Johnson said. “The primary receiver, when he’s open, we’ve got to make sure we hit him. And then, all of our pass catchers, we just harped on it today, we need to be more disciplined in our route detail. It’s not where it needs to be. Our depth’s not proper all the time. Our steps [aren’t]. Everybody has a role to play to get this pass game cleaned up. It’s not where it needs to be. We’re winning in spite of our passing game , not because of it and none of us are pleased with that right now.”
The Bears have still managed to score the eighth-most points in the league to this point in the season and Williams is below the league average in interception rate with five on 396 pass attempts, so the low completion percentage has not been a major drag on the offense. It will need to improve for Williams to be the kind of quarterback the Bears hope he can become, though, and any uptick over the rest of the season will help the Bears’ chances of playing deep into January.
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