Chicago Bears wide receiver Luther Burden III ran back to the visitors sideline at Seattle’s Lumen Field on Monday night with a message for quarterback Caleb Williams.
The Bears had just accomplished a rare feat. Before Burden caught a 1-yard touchdown pass at the end of an opening drive that spanned 8 minutes, 32 seconds, the last team to score a touchdown against Seattle on its first possession was the 49ers in Week 1 of the 2025 season.
“I went up to him and told him I don’t care who they is,” the wide receiver said about the defending Super Bowl champs. “No. 1 defense, I don’t care.”
After slapping hands with his teammate, Williams stood up from the bench and echoed Burden’s sentiment.
“I don’t give a f--- who they are!” Williams yelled.
Chicago’s 34-17 takedown of the Seahawks capped a unique set of primetime performances as the Bears beat Super Bowl runner-up New England in Week 7 and the defending champs in back-to-back games. It was the first such sequence in franchise history.
The victory made the Bears the favorites to represent the NFC in Super Bowl LXI, and it planted Williams firmly in the MVP conversation. Williams entered Week 9 with the fourth-shortest odds (+500) to win MVP, according to DraftKings Sportsbook. He trailed the Buffalo Bills’ Josh Allen (+165), San Francisco 49ers’ Brock Purdy (+450) and Cincinnati Bengals’ Joe Burrow (+475).
The Bears (6-2) have won all three games since Williams returned from a hamstring injury that sidelined him Weeks 3-5. In fact, they haven’t trailed in any of the three and have topped 30 points each time. That streak will be challenged Sunday night by a visiting Tampa Bay Buccaneers team yielding just 18.9 points per game, the fifth-best mark in the league.
Then again, no quarterback had thrown for 200 yards on Seattle’s defense in 2026 until Williams reached 247. That was his third game with at least one touchdown, no interceptions and a 70% or higher completion percentage this season, tying him for the league lead, according to ESPN Research.
Williams ranks second in completion percentage (70.9%), fourth in interception rate (0.6), seventh in success rate (51.1), fifth in yards per attempt (8.0) and 11th in yards per game (253.4). He is third in QBR (78.9), third in EPA per dropback (0.24) and fifth in win probability added (117.0%).
Here’s a look at how Williams has played his way into the MVP mix.
Why Caleb Williams’ decisiveness wins
One of the last things Williams and USC coach Lincoln Riley would utter during Trojans quarterback meetings was to be decisive.
“When you’re hesitant, bad things happen,” Williams said. “So, decisiveness wins is what I go by, a slogan I go by.”
While he was sidelined for three games, Williams often thought about ways he could demonstrate better decisiveness when he got back on the field. The things that would allow him to play faster and deliver a cleaner ball to his intended target meant having conviction in where his reads would take him.
“Most of the time, you’re seeing less of the superhero plays,” backup quarterback Tyson Bagent said. “He’s only letting that come when it presents itself.
“Other than that, he’s anticipating things like I haven’t seen him do before, and he’s just in a good rhythm, playing at a high level.”
That decisiveness has generated more consistency in the passing game. Williams became the first Bears quarterback since Mitchell Trubisky in 2018 to throw for 300 yards in back-to-back wins over the Falcons and Patriots.
It has also elevated the play of his top pass catchers. After totaling 13 receptions for 110 yards in the first five games of the season, tight end Colston Loveland has turned 20 catches into 199 yards and two touchdowns since Williams’ return in Week 6.
Williams’ decisiveness has allowed him to become the NFL’s most successful quarterback when not under duress. He has completed 86% of his passes (96 of 112 attempts) when not pressured, the highest completion percentage when not pressured by any quarterback through five starts of a season since ESPN began tracking pressures in 2009.
And most impressively, he has yet to throw an interception on those 112 attempts.
That’s considerable improvement from last season, when he completed 66.2% of his passes without pressure, the third-lowest rate in the league along with the fourth-highest off-target rate (16.1%).
In his past three games, Williams is 63-of-70 (90%) when not pressured. He leads all quarterbacks with an 85.7% completion rate when not under duress.
Less Superman, more checkdowns are not a bad thing
One hallmark of Bears training camp practices was long-drive drills as the offense ate up the clock while deliberately moving the ball downfield.
Those grind-it-out periods translated to the regular season. In total, the Bears have run 21 drives that went 10-plus plays (second most in the NFL), with 15 of those drives culminating in a touchdown or field goal.
On the Bears’ opening drive in Seattle, Williams led his unit 80 yards on 17 plays while attempting 10 short throws, none that resulted in more than a 15-yard completion.
“I would say I’ve grown in that area,” Williams said. “I can go back to high school; all I did was take shots. I went to college and scrambled around a little bit. I took a few checkdowns, very little.
“And then my first year [in the NFL] was very little. I got sacked a lot, all that. Then this past year, I found a few more [checkdowns], scrambled still a little bit. And then this year, it’s just being a lot more comfortable with the playbook and understanding it and what we want to do with certain plays. From there, being able to, when they don’t get the specific coverage, just being able to check the ball down and keep the drive alive.”
That mindset is the catalyst behind Williams’ 71% completion percentage, which ranks second behind Burrow. Williams ranks fifth in the NFL in yards per attempt (8.0) and 28th in air yards per attempt (6.5)
The Bears’ quarterback already has three games during which he has completed at least 70% of his passes after having none in 2025.
“He’s hitting the top of the drop and the ball’s coming out where it’s supposed to be or he’s quickly down to a progression or checkdown to keep us on schedule,” offensive coordinator Press Taylor said. “I think he and a lot of our guys realize now if we can in these normal-down situations, we’re just going to keep unloading the clip, and we’re going to keep firing and keep doing all this. When it’s there, take it; when it’s not, put it in play.”
Putting more on Caleb Williams’ plate
In preparation for the reigning Super Bowl champion defense, Ben Johnson and his coaches created a game plan to combat the variety of fronts and pressures Seattle runs out of the same personnel groupings.
The goal was to generate explosive runs while simultaneously reducing negative plays. It was a complex plan that demanded more from Williams to put the offense in position to succeed.
“There were probably more kills on each and every run play than we normally have,” Taylor said. “So, he’s got a lot of responsibility in terms of diagnosing what the front is, understanding why we’re killing a play or why we’re changing a play based on what the look is, because they’re not all the same.”
Williams battled through the stress that came with mastering this heavy pre-snap mental load. Taylor noted how frustrated the quarterback grew with himself in walk-throughs while spitting out the calls, well before this task got harder with the element of Seattle’s crowd noise.
By game time, the hiccups Williams had experienced were in the past.
“He has so much going on,” right tackle Darnell Wright said. “He’ll start the week, he’ll have all of his stuff and then by the time we get to the game, I don’t know how -- he’s obviously studying -- but for some reason, it starts off pretty bumpy. We all have our little bumps and then by the time we get to game, he’s just clean as a whistle.”
The result of Williams’ heavy pre-snap load was the highest passing output allowed in 2026 by the Seahawks and a run game that finally popped in the second half, headlined by D’Andre Swift’s three rushing touchdowns.
When Johnson was hired to redirect Williams’ development after a disastrous rookie season, he made a promise to give the quarterback the type of hard coaching he desired. Routinely pushing Williams out of his comfort zone means challenging him to execute plays he might not have full confidence in initially.
“The good news about him is there’s not a throw he can’t make on the football field, so it might be something that we haven’t had a whole lot of reps of,” Johnson said. “But I think he appreciates being pushed a little bit in different areas that he might not always love that particular play, but the more we talk about it and we rep it, I think he can see where there’s benefits to executing that on field.”
It’s those conversations that have strengthened the connection between a playcaller and his MVP-caliber quarterback.
“I obviously trust Ben with it, and so when he calls something and I don’t like it, we go up in the office, we sit down, we talk about it,” Williams said. “He shows me clips, and if I still don’t like it and I still don’t see it, he won’t call it because it’s kind of butchering me out there, and he’s awesome with that.
“A lot of times, we’ll go up in the office, we’ll talk about it, we’ll watch multiple, multiple, multiple clips, then at the end of it, I typically feel pretty good about it and where we want to go with the ball.”