Do you scent it within the air?
It’s nearly tangible at this level.
The Chicago Bears are shut. They are actually shut.
The Chicago Bears are thisclose to placing it all collectively.
Let’s have a look at what we’ve seen this season. We’ve seen the Chicago Bears protection step up, like they did for about 55 of 60 minutes of the sport in opposition to the New Orleans Saints.
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We’ve seen the offensive line come collectively. With that, we’ve seen the working sport beginning to churn the way in which a Ben Johnson working sport ought to churn.
We’ve seen Caleb Williams play lights out in a sport. We’ve seen Caleb Williams come up huge when it issues.
We’ve seen moments the place the Bears averted making errors, and we’ve seen moments the place the Bears took benefit of their opponents’ errors. We’ve seen the Bears overcome poor officiating.
We’ve seen it all.
We simply haven’t seen it all on the identical time.
I’m undecided when that’s going to occur. It may occur this week in opposition to Baltimore. Perhaps it nonetheless takes a number of weeks. Perhaps it doesn’t occur till subsequent yr. But you can feel it, it’s going to occur.
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Let’s take a minute to speak about Dennis Allen’s protection.
This is what we thought it could be, was it not?
The protection was aggressive, it was inventive, it was really Dennis Allen. Think about this, the Bears had 4 sacks, just one got here from a defensive lineman. They had 7 QB hits; solely 3 got here from the line of defense.
We’ve talked about how this line of defense goes to proceed to battle attempting to get stress with 4, and Dennis Allen received inventive with blitzes and twists, and we noticed issues open up when he introduced guys from the again seven.
The turnovers aren’t sustainable, however whereas they are happening, let’s simply take pleasure in them. The Bears are attacking the ball, and it’s working proper now.
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On offense, who is that this working again sporting the D’Andre Swift jersey? He’s been completely unimaginable and searching like a Pro Bowler. Look, we all know Swift has his limitations. He’s by no means going to be a dominant runner between the tackles, and he’s by no means going to have unimaginable imaginative and prescient that can wow you. But when the offensive line is obstructing like it at the moment is, Swift hits the holes so rapidly and is working with power north and south proper now that it’s simply actually working.
Caleb Williams? No doubt proper now, he’s struggling. His final two performances haven’t been good. The Bears have performed six video games up to now. If we are being robust on Caleb, what sort of grades would we give him? I’d give poor grades in opposition to Minnesota, New Orleans, and Washington. I’d give him a meh grade in opposition to Detroit. I’d give him a superb grade in opposition to Las Vegas, and I’d give him an impressive grade in opposition to Dallas.
I don’t deliver up these performances to say that we needs to be involved about Caleb Williams. I deliver them as much as say that primarily based on the expansion we’ve seen with Caleb throughout the physique of the sport and the way he’s working with Ben Johnson, we should always nonetheless have faith that that is going to come back collectively for Caleb with how Ben is working with him and educating him.
But the Bears are 4-2. It will not be excellent, however the crew and the tradition are profitable video games proper now. They’ve received 4 straight, they usually’ve completed it with two subpar performances from their quarterback.
You can simply feel how shut it is.
The query is, when it comes collectively, simply how good can this crew be?