Everybody wants to talk about Caleb Williams' arm when they talk about the Bears offense, but the actual engine is on the ground. Chicago ranked 31st in EPA per rush before its Week 5 bye last season. After it, the Bears finished second in the entire league in rushing success rate and EPA per carry, trailing only the Rams. That's not a hot streak. That's a scheme finding itself.
Ben Johnson doesn't call runs to set up the pass. He installs the running game first, every single week, treating it as the primary weapon rather than window dressing. Post-bye, 75.7% of Bears runs featured pre-snap motion, up from 54.4% before it, and 66% of carries went right behind guard Jonah Jackson and tackle Darnell Wright. Explosive outside runs, misdirection, lead blockers actually blocking — it's old-school football dressed up with modern window dressing, and it wrecked people down the stretch.
The early-season problems weren't scheme problems, they were communication problems. Chicago racked up 11 pre-snap penalties in its first four games trying to run a playbook full of 10-word calls. Johnson's staff simplified everything into one-word playcalls that still carried all the motions, shifts and adjustments baked in. Less thinking at the line, more executing. That's the kind of fix that doesn't show up on a highlight reel but shows up in the standings.
Williams' half of the equation improved right alongside it. His sack rate dropped from 10.0% to 3.8% as the offense got him out of bad reps faster, even though his completion percentage actually dipped to 58.1%. The efficiency gains showed up elsewhere — Williams averaged 10.2 air yards per attempt on play-action, well ahead of what Jared Goff was doing in Detroit's version of this offense at 7.0. Johnson wants more checkdowns to receivers in motion in 2026, the kind of easy, schemed-up completions that turn into chunk plays instead of just first downs.
Now the fantasy math. Williams is sitting around QB7 in early 2026 ADP, going off the board somewhere in the mid-80s overall — end of the seventh round in 12-team leagues, ninth round in 10-teamers. That's behind Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson, Drake Maye, Joe Burrow, Jayden Daniels and Jalen Hurts, but ahead of names like Dak Prescott, Justin Herbert and Trevor Lawrence. Given that this offense is designed to manufacture explosive plays through the air off run fakes and motion, that price feels light for a guy entering Year 2 in a system that's already shown it can hit second-half-of-season gear.
The system also tells you where to look for value around him. Rome Odunze got more tight alignments after the bye as a blocking piece, which cuts both ways for fantasy — it's good for scheme trust, less good for target volume in a vacuum. Luther Burden emerged as a legit blocking threat too, which usually means Johnson trusts him enough to keep him on the field for early-down snaps that eventually turn into schemed touches. Both are worth knowing before you draft either as a locked-in target hog; this offense earns its explosive plays through structure, not just Williams chucking it deep.
Johnson himself called this team the league's No. 1 regression candidate, which is coach-speak for managing expectations after a scorching finish. But the flip side of regression risk is that the Bears now have a full year of install behind them — the communication kinks are fixed, the run-game identity is set, and Williams understands the verbiage instead of translating it in real time. If the running game travels the way it did after last year's bye, this offense doesn't need positive regression to hit its 2026 number. It just needs to keep doing what it was already doing in December.
Watch the offensive line reps in camp and the early-season penalty count as your tell. If Chicago opens clean instead of needing another five weeks to find its rhythm, Williams' ADP is going to look like a steal by Week 6, and the Bears' win total — currently hovering in the middle of the pack in most sportsbooks — starts looking like the easier side of the market too.