The Chicago Bears fired ailing head coach Matt Eberflus after Week 13. Somewhere, a finger was slowly curling up on the severed monkey’s paw.

Chicago’s decision to promote interim offensive coordinator Thomas Brown to the helm made sense. After all, his playbook of quick passes and instruction to run at the first sign of pressure had unlocked some of rookie quarterback Caleb Williams’ best football performances this fall.

That didn’t work on the field. The Bears gained five yards of total offense in the first half of Brown’s Week 14 debut against the San Francisco 49ers. With a chance to dent NFC North rival Minnesota’s chances of winning a division title, Chicago’s offense shrank again.

There, on the bench, after intercepting a brutal hit from the Vikings’ relentless pass rush following a second drive in the red zone that was completely botched by stupid penalties, Williams found a way to celebrate the Bears’ 2024 without a single word to summarize.

This is the face of a man who is battered and exhausted. He’s stuck behind an offensive line that gave him so little time to throw, except that one of his passes in the first half went more than five yards beyond the line of scrimmage. His offense ran ten plays inside the Minnesota 21-yard line and called stupid, drive-hindering penalties on four of them.

The rookie was thrown into the same centrifuge that separated Justin Fields from his potential and is suffering the same pain felt by a litany of once-heralded quarterbacks before him. Today is December 16, 2024. It’s the day Caleb Williams truly became a Chicago Bear.

This article originally appeared on For The Win: A battered Caleb Williams on the sidelines perfectly summed up the Bears’ recent disaster