Windy City Gridiron
It’s good to be back to winning football, especially in a commanding way. For the first time in what feels like all season the Chicago Bears were solidly in the driver seat from gun to gun when the visiting Cleveland Browns came into town and suffered a 31-3 blow out.
The performance across all phases cannot be understated, the defense held the Cleveland offense to the 11th worst performance via DVOA since 1978, the offense racked up 21 first downs, 361 total yards of offense and 31 points against a defense that was 2nd best in the league in EPA allowed (now 3rd) and a league leading 37.05% in success rate allowed.
And most importantly the offense breezed to a 28 point win, all this in conditions that saw a high of 8 degrees at kickoff.
It is in my opinion, given the conditions, and quality of defense faced, that this was one of Caleb Williams’ finest games as a professional, and it showcased everything this offense has been building up towards in 2025.
Yes, drops were still an issue, as Bears receivers drop 4 more passes this week, leaving untold yards and possible points on the field. But outside a small lull after half-time, the offense was crisp, moved the ball well and capitalized on the Browns mistakes often from start to finish.
And the best of all? The win put the Bears on the cusp of the playoffs.
A fantastic tidbit from the game Sunday was that with his 1,000th pass attempt on Sunday, Caleb Williams set an NFL record for the least amount of interceptions thrown for any quarterback in NFL history to attempt 1000 passes, throwing just 12 in that timespan.
It’s pretty incredible to be on the right side of the NFL record books when it comes to quarterback play as a Bears fan. While I had imagined a jump in interceptions on the season given the changes that comes with a more aggressive (and new) offense, Caleb is on pace to throw just 1 more interception than last year, while being on pace to increase his total touchdowns by 10, and total yards by over 200.
Overall this was exactly the type of game this team needed to get back on track to get ready for the Packers next week, let’s jump into stats, metrics and play breakdowns!
But first a quick note:
You’ll notice this week on Caleb’s scorecard a new row below the scores for the Halves/Game called Adjusted Game Score. This is something I’ve been looking to implement for some time, I just needed the proper dataset to do so. Averaging all the plays I’ve graded this season and last, I’ve come to find that on average a standard game will have 39 plays to grade.
The problem I sometimes run into is that some games these quarterbacks don’t hit that 39 play threshold, so their graded game score is artificially lowered due to that. The adjusted game score looks to...
