It's third and 26 or something. So once you let very many seconds run off the game clock, if you spike it, all you can do is try a 58 FG on fourth. Yea, better than the disorganized hail Mary they tried. I agree.

If you call TO, and run a third down play, you have to get OOB. You should be able to pick up 5+ yards or throw the ball away and then attempt the FG. Better than what they did.

But it seems the players should have been coached to not need to call TO in that situation.

Get up to the line, use the whole field to pick up ten yards and then call final TO. Or possibly QB run for a few yards, if he doesn't see a pass he likes. Or throw it away and try 58 FG.

caleb has had some wild peaks and valleys, i look forward to seeing him with a real coach next season. He cleans up some of his dumb rookie shit and the bears have an actual offense, they could win double digit games. hell, if they had a half decent coach they could be pushing 10 wins THIS year, rookie QB warts and all,!but the coach has blown multiple games so

The best option once the playcall wasn’t in was probably to get to the line quickly and barrel forward for a few cheap yards followed by a quick timeout followed by a 55-58 yard FG in a dome. He took easily the worst option and was so sure of it that he took his sweet time to snap the ball.

Without a doubt. The question is if he’s coachable and if he can molded into a leader. And will an elite coach like Ben Johnson hang his hat on him, let alone want to work with their god awful ownership. The raw talent without a doubt is there.

Caleb is a rookie QB. Probably in most cases rookie QBs aren’t in the habit of independently calling TOs in critical moments. He had enough going on trying to get the play from the OC in his helmet with all that crowd noise, get his team the play, remember what the play actually entails, make sure his guys were lining up correctly, etc.

Also, these situations should’ve been game planned for weeks before they happen in a game, no? But obviously they weren’t prepared at any level for that situation. And when it was obvious they weren’t prepared, it was on the HC to intervene and call the TO before too much time ran off the clock. That’s literally his job, isn’t it?

But he has the green light to independently change the final play? Why would he have authority to change plays but not the authority to call a timeout? That’s what doesn’t hang together for me. He had multiple outs. Call TO on his own. If he isn’t “allowed” to do that then run the play that was called. If he is nervous about clock, throw it away and take the 58 yard FG or run forward for a closer FG.

Flus put him in that situation because he’s a terrible game manager. He got canned, as he should’ve been long long ago. But Caleb had multiple outs. And he not only independently made the td play call, he was so sure of it that he very slowly walked up to the line so that a throwaway wasn’t even an option if it wasn’t there.

I'm not buying the I don't call the timeouts bullshit.

Not that I want to defend that dumpster fire of an organization, but I'd like to know what the play call was. Was it a quick 5 yard dump and timeout to follow? We know what he apparently changed the play to.

Whatever it was, Mr. Unemployed should have stopped the bleeding when it became obvious the train had derailed.

Caleb panicked too, if anything else he should've taken command and called the timeout like leader should if the HC chews him out fine. Still saved seconds for at least 3 plays

I didn’t say he wasn’t allowed to do it. I said he’s a rookie and he probably didn’t feel like it was his decision. I think he panicked when he saw there was just :10 seconds or so left and made an impetuous decision. I’m not saying he’s completely guiltless, but who’s the adult and who’s the first year 20-something kid?

I’ll put it another way: if I put your 23-yr old self in my Metroliner II at 20,000 ft and we have a left engine fire, you think you’re going to do everything correctly to get that plane on the ground safely? Btw, you have less than 3 minutes before the wing collapses. You’d have a few weeks training in a simulator with maybe a dozen reps at it, obviously no reps in a real plane.

And you’d have to assess that the engine really was in fact on fire, go through your memory items, attempt to put the fire out, shut down and secure the engine, call ATC and declare an emergency, ask for clearance to the nearest airport you could land at that had a long enough runway, get your descent clearance from ATC, contact the airport when appropriate, navigate to and fly the crippled plane to the airport, go through your landing checklist when appropriate, and finally land safely, all while your plane is on fire and before the wing falls off. Just fyi, normal descent rates are between 1,500ft/min and 4,000. So you'd be descending at a rate far faster than anything you'd be accustomed to in a real plane to be on the ground in less than 3 minutes. That’s not the whole list of shit-to-do, but it’s close enough.

Or do you think the guy with dozens of years of experience in his job as a professional should probably take over the decision making/operational processes?

Betcha the Bears hire another ****ing dunce HC

Eberflus is no doubt the biggest culprit. But it just feels like it’s having it both ways. If he has no authority to call a sensible timeout without his coaches say so, then he also doesn’t have authority to change the final playcall. If he’s truly a puppet to his head coach then he would just run the play as was called, which I assume would have been a quick hitter instead of sending the entire team deep.

Since trace Armstrong shadow runs the team bears fans are terrified it will be Mike McCarthy or more realistically someone like Lincoln Riley. Joe Brady is also a Trace client so that isn’t the worst call, but if Ben Johnson isn’t hired for this reason bears fans need to show up with pitchforks

Yeah it's like 80/20 coach to QB but it absolutely is having it both ways.

Again, I never said he didn't have the authority to call a TO; obviously the guy with the green dot on his helmet has the 'authority' to call a TO. My point is, imo rookie QBs rarely call TOs. That's the HC's job. I mean, how many times have we seen rooks forget to check the clock as time is winding down and get flagged for delay-of-game? Happens pretty much every week, right? And good/great HCs see it and make the call themselves, correct?

Or, take Herbert's rookie year, he was driving his team down the field for a tying/go-ahead score (don't remember which exactly) and they got the ball down inside the 10-yd line, at which point Herbert tried to hurry up to the line and run the next play. A TO should've been called there, so they could get the right play in, settle everyone down, get the right players on the field, etc.

but Staley allowed things to happen, and they ended up turning the ball over on an INT or a fumble or whatever, that cost them the game. It was an obvious TO situation, but they failed to do what we all thought was beyond simple in the GDT that day.

Should/could Herbert have called a TO/spiked it there? Empirically, yes, obviously.

but you're asking a rookie QB in the heat and stress of the moment to make that decision, when they have a million other things running through the heads, while a OC is trying to get the playcall in, etc. It's the HC's job to see the situation, and using his decades of experience to mitigate the stress of the moment, and take that very critical decision out of a rook's hands, imo.

As for the change of play, I think that again was just a panic moment for a rookie QB when he realized they'd run out of time. He went gunslinger mode, or what we call "Jackie Channed it," in aviation parlance. All instinct, no rational thought.

Caleb Williams 14 TD, 5 int, 86.1 rating
Bo Nix 16 TD, 6 int, 89.9 rating
Jayden Williams 12 TD, 5 int, 97.6 rating

And Drake Maye gonna be better than all of em.