What Caleb Williams’ quest for 4,000 yards means for the Bears
SOURCE:The Athletic|BY:Dan Wiederer
For the Bears, everything with quarterback history is relative. Still, Williams' bid to claim an elusive passing record has meaning.
Caleb Williams didn’t hesitate. As the Chicago Bears reported to training camp in late July and the second-year quarterback was asked directly how he would define his individual success in 2025, he steered the conversation first to a well-known number.
You could almost see it glowing — 4,000 — with Williams staring at it the way Indiana Jones marveled at the golden idol in that ancient South American temple.
“That’s a goal of mine,” Williams announced, very aware of what the frontier represented in Chicago.
He knew full well the difficulty of getting his grasp around that elusive single-season passing yards milestone as a Bears quarterback. In 105 seasons before this, no Bear had ever made it to 4,000 yards in a season. Only three had made it within 300 yards, including Williams himself as a rookie. Chicago’s history is full of so many eager souls cruelly detoured, derailed and sometimes swallowed by an array of booby traps.
Williams has spent his first 20 months in Chicago on a quest to become the hero for this storied charter franchise, the next-level passing playmaker capable of unlocking worlds the Bears have rarely experienced while achieving feats no Bears quarterback ever has.
Suddenly, in the final week of the regular season, this glow feels warmer, more intense. With the NFC North championship secured and the Bears preparing to host a playoff game, Williams has a target number for Sunday’s regular-season finale: 270. That’s the passing yards total he’ll need against the Detroit Lions to reach 4,000.
In the grand scheme of this remarkable Bears season, it’s merely an arbitrary number, but Williams’ ability to close in on that achievement offers proof of progress for the franchise and for a young quarterback who has shown considerable evidence he is moving in the right direction.
Join the club
After Sunday’s 330-yard eruption in a 42-38 road loss to the San Francisco 49ers, Williams seems to be a shoo-in to at least break the franchise record for single-season passing yards of 3,838. That’s a 30-year-old mark set by Erik Kramer way back during the Clinton administration, during the Dave Wannstedt era of Bears football, during a 9-7 season in 1995 in which the Green Bay Packers’ Brett Favre led the league with 4,413 yards.
(For cruel context, that was the Packers’ third 4,000-yard passing season. They now have 18.)
Erik Kramer’s Bears single-season passing record has stood for 30 years. Caleb Williams is poised to eclipse it on Sunday. (Doug Pensinger / Allsport)
That’s the thing about this glow of 4,000. Every other team in the NFL has felt its warmth. Every. Single. One.
Seventy-one quarterbacks in all have enjoyed that accomplishment, a list that includes nine current Hall of Famers but also random names like Josh Freeman, Elvis Grbac, Jay Schroeder and Blake Bortles. Nine quarterbacks have made it past 5,000 yards, including Drew Brees. He did it five times.
Even the Houston Texans, who came into the league 82 seasons after the Bears, watched Matt Schaub join the 4,000-yard club in 2009, in just the franchise’s eighth season.
Schaub did it again the following year, too. Two seasons after that, Deshaun Watson also reached the milestone for Houston. Then did it again. C.J. Stroud popped in as a rookie in 2023. So, yes, the NFL’s newest franchise — est. 2002 — has a half-dozen 4,000-yard passing seasons.
The Bears are still chasing their first.
Williams, coming off Sunday night’s fireworks show in California, is now within realistic striking distance. No wonder the echoes of his March 2024 declaration seem louder this week.
“I’m my own player,” Williams said at the NFL combine when asked how he’d view himself within the context of the Bears’ maddening quarterback archives. “I tend to like to create history and rewrite history.”
This is a small part of that.
If at first …
Four quarterbacks have already gone past 4,000 yards this season, including Williams’ Class of 2024 draft pal, Drake Maye, with the New England Patriots. Including Williams, as many as a half-dozen more could enter this season’s 4,000-yard club this weekend.
So, yeah. As with so many things Bears-related, this whole thing is a tad complicated and requires framing and context.
Is now the right time to point out that Jay Cutler is a card-carrying 4,000-yard member himself? Except Cutler did it with the Broncos in 2008, the season before the Bears traded for him.
Andy Dalton is the other former Bears QB in the group photo, enjoying two 4,000-yard seasons (2013 and 2016) in Cincinnati.
Since Kramer posted his franchise record total of 3,838 yards 30 years ago, breaking Billy Wade’s 1962 mark of 3,172, the Bears have used 37 starting quarterbacks.
Have fun with all the random names sprinkled through that list, from Rick Mirer to Kordell Stewart to Brian Griese, from Chris Chandler to Brian Hoyer to Nick Foles, from Henry Burris to Todd Collins to Jason Campbell.
Jay Cutler had five 3,000-yard passing seasons as a Bear but never cracked the 4,000-yard barrier, falling just short in 2014. (Jonathan Daniel / Getty Images)
Since 1995, fifteen of those quarterbacks share the distinction of having been a Week 1 starter for the Bears for at least one season, creating their own waves of hope and optimism before disappointment came blitzing off the edge.
Cade McNown’s journey was over before it started. The No. 12 pick in the 1999 draft had only 3,111 career passing yards with just 15 starts across two short seasons in Chicago.
Cutler, with five 3,000-yard passing seasons as a Bear, was all too frequently knocked off course by inconsistency and injury. He fell 26 yards short of Kramer’s record in 2014 after managing just 172 yards in the season finale, a 13-9 loss in Minnesota.
(Let the record reflect that Cutler had also been benched by coach Marc Trestman the previous week in favor of Jimmy Clausen.)
Seven years ago, Mitch Trubisky passed for 3,223 yards plus 24 touchdowns in his second season (and his first with coach Matt Nagy), even making a trip to that winter’s Pro Bowl as an alternate. It felt like the start of something. Instead, 2018 was Trubisky’s peak as his trail all too quickly diverted toward the land of proud professional backups.
Despite Justin Fields’s electricity as a runner — and the second-most productive rushing season by any NFL quarterback (1,143 yards in 2022) — he never made it close to 4,000 passing yards. His best season was 2,562 in 2023. With the Bears, he had more than twice as many starts with fewer than 125 passing yards (11) as he had 250-yard games (five).
Chances are
Just to be clear, the Bears have bigger fish to fry Sunday than locking in on Williams’ statistical production. A victory over Detroit would secure the No. 2 seed for the NFC playoffs, perhaps positioning the Bears to even host the conference championship game if the NFC West champion — either the 49ers or Seahawks — were to trip in its postseason opener.
Thus, Williams’ pursuit of 4,000 yards will be more for bar conversation and fun TV graphics this week than any significant part of the Bears’ game-planning operation.
Of note: across 33 starts, Williams has reached 270 passing yards just nine times. So while that golden number is clearly in sight, it’s in play that the Bears quarterback won’t complete this quest this season.
However, at long last, Kramer’s record figures to fall Sunday evening.
Furthermore, with just 118 passing yards against Detroit, Williams will have signed his name twice among the top five single-season passing totals in team history. That’s nothing to scoff at, particularly as it relates to his underrated durability and his likely achievement of becoming the first Bears quarterback since 1977 to start every game in consecutive seasons. Move over, Bob Avellini.
Throughout this extraordinary season for the team at large, Williams has continued showing signs of meaningful development under coach Ben Johnson’s guidance.
He’s avoiding sacks and turnovers almost as well as any QB1 in the league. He’s become far more competent with his pre-snap operation and post-snap comfort. His confidence and playmaking prowess in the clutch are a big reason the Bears are rejoining the playoff party.
Johnson believes now as much as ever that Williams’ long-term potential is unlimited. That could help unlock new worlds for the Bears in the years to come and to create an express lane for sustained success.
In the short term, however, here in Week 18, Williams’ chase of 4,000 merits attention. It’s history that is long overdue.
