Caleb Williams escaped the pocket to his left and saw green grass.
The Chicago Bears quarterback sprinted at full speed toward the pylon. NFL Next Gen Stats clocked him over 20 miles per hour on the scramble, the fastest run of his young NFL career.
Williams saw one man to beat, Minnesota Vikings cornerback Jeff Okudah, and he lowered his shoulder, brushed off the would-be tackler and found the end zone. Six points for the Bears. It was a touchdown on the first possession of the game for coach Ben Johnson’s offense — something the Bears failed to do all of last season.
It felt like the moment Bears fans had been waiting months for. Their quarterback engineered a 10-play, 61-yard touchdown-scoring drive to open the game. He was a perfect 6-for-6 on the possession, and he punctuated it with a 9-yard touchdown run himself.
But as electric and exciting as that moment was for the 58,742 fans at Soldier Field on Monday, the rest of the offensive performance was equally disappointing.
The Bears didn’t find the end zone again until late in the game. They blew an 11-point lead and watched Vikings quarterback J.J. McCarthy lead his team to three fourth-quarter touchdowns in a 27-24 Minnesota win to open the season.
“Just inconsistent,” Johnson said of the offense. “We felt like we were going to get some completions to get us going there, get the ball in our playmakers’ hands, and it was a little bit harder to come by.”
As his players have described him all throughout training camp, Johnson was all business on the sideline. Watching his team warm up half an hour before kickoff — with the world watching on “Monday Night Football” — Johnson observed his team’s final run-through with his hands in his pockets, a stoic look on his face.
He simply observed. Offense. Defense. Special teams. The coach did not crack a smile. He did not bark or yell. He hardly said a word to anyone as his assistant coaches ran the warmups.
His demeanor never changed once the game started. He was a man deep in his work. And the results did not match the expectations.
“The running game just didn’t feel — I didn’t feel the rhythm as I was calling it,” Johnson said. “It was some good and some not quite so good, and it didn’t seem like we were all quite on the same page the whole time. Like I said, that’s a reflection of me as much as anything else.”
The Bears scored a field goal before halftime and led, 10-6, at the break. But they had missed several opportunities to add to their lead, including a failed fourth-down try from the 24-yard line. Cornerback Nahshon Wright’s 74-yard interception return touchdown put the Bears ahead, 17-6, and felt as if it could be the spark the team needed.
“We felt like we were dominating the game, in control,” Williams said. “Up two scores.”
The offense, though, was mired in five consecutive scoreless drives. Several of Williams’ pass attempts were well off the mark. The quarterback began the game by completing his first 10 passes. He finished the contest 21-for-35 for 210 yards with one touchdown pass.
“He started off really well and then I don’t know,” Johnson said. “I’ll have to go back and look at exactly where those incompletions came in, but it certainly felt like it dried up a little bit.”
“We just hit kind of a slump,” Bears receiver Rome Odunze said.
When the offense finally did start moving the sticks on one possession late in the third quarter — 59 yards of offense over 11 plays — the drive stalled just outside the red zone due to a holding penalty and an intentional grounding penalty against Williams. Kicker Cairo Santos missed a 50-yard field goal try.
The Bears, who led 17-6 at the time, went from possibly extending their lead heading into the fourth quarter to coming away with nothing.
“You certainly feel it when you’re on the sideline there,” Johnson said. “You’ve got it moving, you’ve got it going, and then all the sudden it starts going backwards and negative plays are happening.”
The air fizzled out of Soldier Field like a punctured balloon, especially as McCarthy — the Chicago-area native making his NFL debut — engineered three consecutive touchdown drives in the fourth quarter. The final Vikings score, a 14-yard McCarthy rushing touchdown, put Minnesota ahead by 10 points with just under three minutes remaining in the game.
The Bears offense had no answers. It needed somebody to step up, but the mistakes just kept compounding.
“In those moments, it doesn’t necessarily come down to somebody doing anything outstanding,” Williams said. “It doesn’t come down to anybody doing anything out of character or anything like that. It comes down to being able to go out there and be together, all 11 on the field doing our job at one time.”
For Johnson’s offense, that simply didn’t happen enough on Monday night.