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Caleb Williams needs to be more involved in the Bears coaching search than Justin Fields

Caleb Williams needs to be more involved in the Bears coaching search than Justin Fields

Day, Bears introduced Matt EberfluAs head coach, Justin Fields was asked if he had any contact with the team’s three finalists.

“No,” Fields said.

In fact, Fields first met Eberflus on the day he was introduced, January 31, 2022.

What about Luke Getsy, the offensive coordinator Eberflus brought in from the Packers?

“I haven’t met him yet, so I don’t know much about him,” Fields said.

Did Fields receive a Getsy search report from anyone?

“No,” Fields said.

The Bears can’t afford to repeat that scene when they hire their next head coach next month – or, if their candidate makes it to the Super Bowl, the next month.

Like Mitch Trubisky and Fields, quarterback Caleb Williams will watch as his team searches for a coach to work with him for Year 2. The Bears need to listen to Williams, the No. 1 pick in April’s draft. It’s not enough to simply say that hiring will be based on a potential candidate pledging to work with Williams.

Williams is not Fields. The CEO who appointed him remains in office, and their futures are intertwined.

“I don’t know what the specific information is, but it certainly has to be a major part of the interview,” CEO Ryan Poles said Monday. “We’re making sure there’s a plan for the young quarterback in this league.”

The Bears should allow Williams to be part of this plan. After all, he is the most attractive part of their vacancy – and will be even more so if he finishes the season as well as he has played over the last three weeks under Thomas Brown. All the rest are fighting for second place.

“We will have plenty of salary cap space, we have young talent, we have strong draft capital in the upcoming draft,” president/CEO Kevin Warren said. “We also have a point guard in Caleb Williams, who has shown that he is special, and in the right environment, he can become even more special than he has already shown.”

It’s up to the Bears to create the right environment for him in Year 2. They tried and failed to do so this season. Eberflus thought he had found the perfect coordinator for Williams in Shane Waldron, who had the experience Getsy lacked. The Poles believed they were progressive earlier this year when the Bears taught the Williams Waldron playbook during a trip to USC and the quarterback’s visit to Halas Hall. They thought trading for Keenan Allen, signing D’Andre Swift and drafting Rome Odunze would give him an unprecedented advantage.

Instead, Waldron lasted nine games, Eberflus 12.

The longest pause for Poles on Monday was the moment when he was asked what happened to Waldron. The players wanted Waldron to be more direct with both Williams and the veterans, especially when they made mistakes in training.

There was some communication that probably wasn’t as clean as it should have been,” he said. “We just started off hard. It’s always difficult when you have a young quarterback. We built it to have support around Caleb. When you have a mix of young starting point guards and experienced players, the job is a tall order. I think it took some fighting to get there.

You’re never sure how a coach and player will interact until they’re in the same building. That’s what makes Brown’s five-game tryout as interim head coach so fascinating. The same can be said about the candidacy of Kliff Kingsbury, the Commanders’ offensive coordinator who helped coach Williams at USC last year. The Bears know how each of them interacts with Williams and what he thinks of them.

There will be other candidates. Before making a decision, the Bears need to make sure Williams knows them, too.