Dan Orlovsky on the Bears: "They Were Awesome. I Thought Caleb Was Awesome."

The best Chicago Bears news of the week is that the guy Bears fans spent two days yelling at actually likes their offense. Dan Orlovsky told the Sun-Times, after the pile-on over his breakdown of Chicago's offense, that "They were awesome. I thought Caleb was awesome." That is not a walk-back dressed up as a compliment. That is a man reading his own notes back out loud.

Here is how this happens, every single season, in every single market. A film analyst goes frame by frame on a quarterback, flags the one rep that did not look clean, and forty seconds of nuance gets sheared down into a clip with a caption. The caption travels. The nuance does not. Chicago, a city that has been protective of its quarterbacks since roughly the invention of the forward pass, hears a critique and files it under disrespect. Then the analyst has to go sit down with a local paper and explain that he was, in fact, praising them.

I do not have Orlovsky's full breakdown in front of me, only the portion Chicago decided to hear. But the word he chose twice was awesome, once for the unit and once for Caleb Williams specifically, and analysts do not hand that word out for free on television. They live in hedges. "Encouraging." "Flashes." "Trending." Awesome is a different tier of vocabulary entirely.

checked the almanac: jay cutler is still the leading passer in bears history, yards and touchdowns both. one franchise, a hundred-plus years, and the ceiling of the position is a guy who left in 2016. that is why chicago flinches at every syllable about its quarterback. the scar tissue is real and it is load-bearing.

What comes next is simple and it is not a debate on a set. Minnesota comes to Soldier Field on Sunday afternoon, and the only film study that will matter by Monday morning is the one everybody watches together in real time. Williams gets a division opponent, a home crowd that has already appointed itself his defense attorney, and another chance to make the argument without a middleman.

What I am watching: whether the version of the Bears offense that earned that word shows up again against a familiar NFC North defense. Praise from the film room is nice. Repeating it on a Sunday is the whole job.