Bears QB Caleb Williams refining his potential by embracing simplicity, delivering efficiency

Caleb Williams isn’t ready to admit he has settled down.

He’s gotten smarter and sharper, embracing some of the simple fundamentals of playing quarterback, and vaulted himself into the MVP race and the Bears into Super Bowl contention. He is, as the Bears hammered to him in the offseason, getting more while doing less.

It was evident in the season opener and even more so in the last three games since returning from a hamstring injury. There’s less running wild, more precision from the pocket. Fewer highlights, but far more efficiency.

He’s embracing that boring can be beautiful.

“I had a couple pretty cool scrambles,” he argued. “I still do all of that.”

One play he probably was thinking of as he interjected was early in the third quarter against the Seahawks, when he dropped back, slipped on the turf and ended up in the arms of defensive tackle Leonard Williams.

But instead of racking up mileage running sideline-to-sideline as he looked for an opening, Williams rolled a few steps to his right and — just as blitzing safety Nick Emmanwori closed in on him from behind — fired a dart over the middle to Rome Odunze for 22 yards.

“I’ve just grown in certain aspects,” Williams said. “I’ve tried to maintain the things that I’ve done well, and then the things that I haven’t done well, just try and up those.”

Confirmed: They’ve been upped.

When the Buccaneers see him for the first time Sunday night at Soldier Field, they’ll wish they’d gotten a shot before he learned all this. He’s always had high-end talent, but now he’s built pillars underneath it: self-control in the pocket, more accurate passing, quicker reads, better anticipation of defensive coverages.

Williams has been unstoppable over his last three games. In wins over the Falcons, Patriots and Seahawks, he completed 73.8% of his passes, averaged 286.7 yards, thrown four touchdown passes with no interceptions and posted a 111.3 passer rating.

As exciting as he was at times last season, he never did that. Not even close, really.

The quarterback who was last in the NFL in completion percentage last season at 58.1 is now second at 70.9. That led to a jump from 6.9 to eight yards per pass. He went from 69.8% of his passes being on target last season, according to Pro Football Reference, to 78.9%, and that bumped the Bears from 10th in yards after catch to fifth.

Williams has been as nonchalant about his progress as he was when he discussed attacking those weaknesses in the offseason. When asked after the Seahawks game about seeing that work materialize as more efficiency on the field, he asked, “Uh, how efficient was I?”

A 101.0 passer rating and 70.6 completion percentage.

“Cool, cool,” he replied.

He continued, “The work that you put in, when it shows up and you can find ways to be consistent, it’s another motivating factor for me that I’m doing something right. I need to keep going. I need to keep finding ways to get better.”

Continuing to fine-tune the basics is essential to that.

Williams contradicted himself slightly when he reflected on seeing the value in base hits passes rather than always swinging for the fences.

All he did was fire deep in high school, and at USC he remembered “very little” interest in taking checkdowns. He spent his rookie season running for his life in a terrible offense with a shaky offensive line. He started to see the light last season under coach Ben Johnson, who had helped the Lions’ Jared Goff become one of the NFL’s most surgical quarterbacks, and now their mindsets have further merged.

When Johnson talked to the Sun-Times in training camp about the project of blending Williams’ artistry with the machinelike approach that this playbook is built for, he was clear he didn’t want to turn Williams into Goff, but added, “That doesn’t mean that he can’t share more of those attributes.”

The silver lining of his strained hamstring is that indirectly reinforced some of what Johnson had been teaching.

Williams was already on the right path — the difference was undeniable in the opener against the Panthers — but while he was out, he watched 38-year-old third-stringer Case Keenum carve up the Eagles by simply putting the ball in the right place at the right time.

And while Williams would almost certainly reject this, it’s logical that his mobility would be limited as he plays through the injury, and that might make him more inclined to stay in the pocket as well. He rushed for a combined 64 yards in the last three games, one fewer than he had in the season opener alone.

Williams hasn’t lost himself in his development. Hamstring injury or not, he’s still ready to improvise with mesmerizing scrambles and rare cross-body passes if the need arises. When it’s break-glass-in-case-of-emergency time, no one does it better.

But he’s not relying on that anymore. That’s what it looks like when a talented young quarterback starts refining his potential and delivering production.