LAKE FOREST, Ill. — By the time the Bears’ coordinators spoke to the media on Monday via Zoom, they had already completed their brief review of the Bears’ 31-23 win against the Falcons from the day before.
Defensive coordinator Dennis Allen was itching to dive into the Patriots’ offense with a short week ahead.
“You have to come up with a plan that the guys can go out there and execute,” Allen said. “If you guys let me go, I’ll go in there and start formulating that plan.”
Time’s up. Pencils down. Game day is already here.
Here’s everything you need to know in Week 7 about the Bears, from the podium to the locker room to the injury report before kickoff.
1. Quarterback Caleb Williams is no longer on the Bears’ injury report.
After missing three games with a hamstring injury, Williams was sacked four times and hit seven times by the Falcons on Sunday. But he felt good afterward.
“I didn’t get hit much,” Williams said Tuesday. “Those couple sacks, I probably could have just dirted the ball or threw out of bounds or something. Some of them were in third-and-long situations. So just trying to protect the football in those situations. But I felt great. Body feels good. Didn’t take many hits, didn’t take any devastating hits, at least. So feeling good. Leg feels good. Everything else is kind of normal.”
How normal? Well, he wasn’t listed on the injury list at all this week.
Instead, Williams was awarded NFC Player of the Week honors on Wednesday for his performance in Week 6 (30-for-36 passing, 305 yards, one touchdown, 111.2 rating).
It’s the second time Williams has earned the honor. He earned it in Week 3 of last season against the Cowboys. He’s the second Bears QB to earn the nod twice, joining Jay Cutler.
2. Caleb Williams and Drake Maye have a friendship that dates back years.
“I’ve kind of grown up with Drake throughout the years. We’ve been in the same class for a while. We’ve been to so many camps. Probably one of the closer guys that I am closer to in my class and just overall on another team, if anybody.”
That included the Elite 11 quarterback competition for high school quarterbacks back in 2020. Among the other competitors were Giants quarterback J.J. McCarthy and Bears fourth-string quarterback Miller Moss.
The results of the 2024 NFL Draft will keep their career intertwined, too. Williams went first overall. Maye went two picks later to the Patriots.
“Being able to watch him kind of grow up and be around each other, it’s been fun,” Williams said. “But his mobility and things like that, it’s always been a weapon for him throughout college, high school, all of that. So it’s gonna be a good challenge for us and our team and we gotta be able to bottle him up.”
3. Drake Maye is going to be a different challenge than Michael Penix Jr.
Defensive coordinator Dennis Allen essentially said as much this week.
“They do an excellent job of throwing the ball down the field,” he said. ”They got some speed at the receiver position. They take their shots. I think Drake Maye’s one of those guys that does an outstanding job with his feet. So there’s been times where you watch it and there’s pressure on the quarterback and he makes people miss and creates some plays down the field. So I see him doing a lot of good things. I see especially his athleticism showing up and his ability to throw the ball down the field has been exceptional.”
Maye leads the NFL in passing yards on completions longer than 20 yards downfield with 439.
His season stats don’t tell the whole story, either.
In six games this season, he’s thrown for 1,463 yards, 11 touchdowns and seven interceptions. From Weeks 4 to 6, Maye has 878 passing yards, 10 touchdowns and only one interception.
4. Ben Johnson and his coaching staff wish that they had more time to prepare this week.
But that’s life in the NFL nowadays.
“I always struggle as a coach of wanting to do more and making sure,” Johnson said Tuesday. “Really, at the end of the day, these guys, they just need to go out there and play as fast as they possibly can, play confident football. For us, it’s just a matter of scaling it back, streamlining it to where they can play fast, they can play clean.
“If we have another high-penalty game like we did last week, that’s not going to play in our favor against a good team like this. We just need to play clean football, and that’s really the message throughout, and let our play style come out and show itself again.”
The Bears had 12 penalties accepted against them for 133 yards – including three free first downs – on Sunday.
5. The Bears offensive line should be at full strength on Thursday night.
Right guard Jonah Jackson left Sunday’s game in Atlanta early in the third quarter with a hip injury. He then popped up on Monday’s injury report with a hip and quadriceps injury. Luke Newman took Jackson’s spot at right guard for the remainder of the game.
Newman, a sixth-round pick of the Bears in 2025, picked up the slack nicely in Jackson’s absence.
But Jackson is a game-changer.
“Jonah brings so much to our offense,” offensive coordinator Press Taylor said Monday. “Just his mindset, his mentality, the play style. I mean, he’s everything we want to be about. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve shown clips of our identity and what it looks like, and it just so happens to be the ball’s running behind Jonah and (right tackle Darnell Wright), like those two in combination. Obviously, Darnell gets a lot of notability and things like that.
“But it’s not lost on us that Jonah is usually right there in combination with him on a lot of these plays, too. So he’s who we want to be. He’s kind of one of the faces of our unit.”
The Bears held walkthroughs on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, so the injury report was an estimation from the team. Jackson, however, improved from a non-participant on Monday to a limited participant on Tuesday before being listed as a full participant on Wednesday.
6. It’ll be running backs D’Andre Swift and Roschon Johnson out of the backfield again, with Kyle Monangai (thumb/toe) set to miss his third consecutive game.
Monangai hasn’t practiced since leaving a Week 4 win against the Jets – in which he ran for 146 yards and two touchdowns on 30 carries.
The good news for the Bears is that Swift and Johnson bounced back from a disappointing first week without Monangai in Green Bay with a stronger outing against the Falcons (95 yards, three touchdowns).
There’s added importance on Johnson’s contributions, too, with Swift managing hip and knee injuries – especially in the red zone, where the Bears went 4-for-5 in Week 6 after entering the game last in the NFL in success rate (9-for-21).
“The run game going is obviously the biggest part,” Taylor said. “Anytime we get in the red zone, it’s no secret we’re trying to run the ball in when we can. … So it was kind of more of being able to execute on things we hadn’t executed on as cleanly before. There weren’t any schematic changes or anything like that. It was more our guys did a great job of executing those situations and punching in for us and we knew we weren’t going to be able to settle for three in those situations against those guys.”
7. Ozzy Trapilo isn’t ready for a full workload quite yet.
Trapilo played 17 offensive and six special teams snaps on Sunday in his first game action since rupturing his patellar tendon in the wild-card round 10 months ago.
“It was good to see him mixed in there,” Taylor said. “I mean, the biggest thing is, like Caleb, we haven’t seen him play a while, so it was, what’s his wind look like? How does he keep his legs underneath him? Obviously, we’ve kind of been going with that rotating the left tackle a little bit, giving everybody some exposure in there and keeping guys fresh. And we think that is a good way for us to keep those guys fresh and keep them playing and keep them at their best. And it was good to see him get going.”
8. Kyler Gordon’s ramp-up also includes a healthy dose of special teams reps.
Like Trapilo, Gordon only played 17 defensive snaps and picked up another nine on special teams, including a few as a gunner on punt coverage.
“I think I did a little bit my rookie year maybe, if not college,” Gordon said. “But that was like my thing in college, so that was like second nature.”
Right now, he’s just happy to be out there contributing any way he can.
“Especially when you’ve got a kicker like Tory (Taylor),” Gordon said, “he’s a really good kicker, too, so it makes it fun.
9. The Patriots have injury problems this week.
Left guard Alijah Vera-Tucker (hamstring) and right guard Ben Brown (knee) were ruled out for Week 7. Right tackle Morgan Moses (foot) is also questionable. He was listed as a limited participant on the practice report throughout the week.
Cornerback Carlton Davis III (neck) and backup cornerback Channing Canada (hamstring) were also ruled out.
Wide receiver Romeo Doubs was placed on injured reserve on Monday with a shoulder injury.
10. If you’re headed to Soldier Field for the game, you’ll want to make sure you’re in line early to partake in the Mike Ditka-themed giveaways.
In addition to fake Ditka-like mustaches for all fans, the first 10,000 arriving fans will receive a headband in the style of the hall-of-famer’s iconic Bears sweater.
The team will hold a moment of silence before the national anthem in their first game back home since Ditka’s death on October 9.
The tributes will also include several montages on the stadium’s video boards throughout the game.