On Sunday in Green Bay, Caleb Williams is set to become the first Bears quarterback to start every regular-season game since Jay Cutler in 2009.
After breaking team rookie passing records for completions, yards and touchdowns, Williams figures to make more strides next year after gaining so much experience.
"It's been good that Caleb has been able to play every game up to this point this year," said tight end Cole Kmet. "That's always a good sign because it's just more reps that you get, and I know Caleb will benefit from that down the road."
The No. 1 overall pick in the draft has completed 61.9% of his passes for 3,393 yards with 19 touchdowns, six interceptions and an 87.4 passer rating. His streak without an interception reached 353 pass attempts before it was broken last Thursday night on the Bears' final offensive play against the Seahawks, the fourth longest streak in NFL history.
Williams enters Week 18 having played 99% of the Bears' offensive snaps this season.
"As many reps as you can get early on in your career is huge," Kmet said. "I just look at myself. I've been able to stay pretty healthy through the course of my career. You can't replace those reps you get. To be able to stay on the field is huge.
"The more reps, the more looks you get in NFL games, you grow from it, you get better from it. Sure, it's not always a steady climb up. There's ups and downs along the way. You always kind of bank those reps that you've had in the past. You can use them in your experiences going forward. It's a big deal that he was able to stay healthy and play this whole season so far."
Kmet has been especially impressed with Williams' off-schedule throws, like the one he made against the Seahawks. Flushed out of the pocket to his left, the rookie quarterback squared his shoulders to the line of scrimmage and rifled a 17-yard touchdown pass to Rome Odunze that was nullified by a penalty.
"I still get back to the arm talent," Kmet said. "It's still really impressive when you see the things that he can do on the run, which are just things that you can't teach. I know the one play that got called back that he made to Rome, those are just things that you don't see everybody making.
"There have been flashes of that across the board, and then you hope that the experiences that he's had in his first year in terms of this is his first time in a huddle, doing the cadence and all those things, those are the things that you want to see take a huge step next year, and I think they will with the way that he prepares and all that stuff in the offseason ahead."
Bears interim coach Thomas Brown, who has called offensive plays since Week 11, believes that Williams' offseason work should begin with mastering the basics.
"Start small and then grow from there," Brown said. "I think oftentimes we want to consume information and we want to get all of it right now at one time, and that's not realistic as far as how learning goes. So I think [begin] from a basic standpoint of processing how you call a play to pre-snap operation to motions and type of motion adjustments, to match everything in that detail before you even worry about specific plays and how concepts come to life, before you worry about an alert or key criteria, before you worry about how to attack multiple coverages.
"It's the operational piece of slowing that process down so we can operate faster in and out of the huddle."
Brown likened the process of digesting an offense to learning a new language.
"If I was trying to start to learn a new language, I'm not going to pick up a book where it's all already in French," Brown said. "I would start with the very basics of how to say basic words, how to transfer certain language barriers and be able to build from there. For him, and not just him but everybody in general, it's being able to start small and go from there."
