One Rusher Cannot Carry a Defense Through October

The depth chart at defensive end reads: Montez Sweat, then Dayo Odeyingbo, then a blank. That's not a rotation. That's a man and a prayer.

I wrote two days ago that Williams returning won't fix the defense. The angle I didn't fully press then is the one that demands attention now: the quarterback's health is a separate variable from the pass-rush problem, and the pass-rush problem does not pause while Chicago waits for its franchise player to get healthy. These are two crises running in parallel, not in sequence. The Bears' front office and the broader conversation around this team keep treating the Williams timeline as the central organizing fact of this season. But look at the defensive end depth chart and tell me how Williams changes what happens when Sweat lines up against a left tackle who has been game-planned specifically to neutralize him, with nothing credible coming from the other side.

The production numbers confirm what the eye test suggests: Sweat accounts for all of the meaningful snap production at defensive end. Odeyingbo registers at zero. Marcus Davenport was signed in August specifically to address this problem — he's gone now. The Bears cycled through that solution already. What replaced it is the same vacancy that existed before the signing, which means the organization has now attempted and failed to solve this problem once, and the season is already underway. That's not a depth question anymore. That's a structural answer the roster is giving back to the coaching staff, and the coaching staff doesn't seem to like what it's hearing.

Here's the part that should genuinely alarm Bears fans who remember last season clearly: Chicago won 11 more percentage points of games in 2025 than their point differential said they deserved. They were a close-game execution team, not a dominant one. That kind of overperformance is almost always unsustainable, and it is especially unsustainable when the mechanism that generates pressure on opposing quarterbacks — which is the single most reliable way to prevent opponents from executing in close games — is running through one body. One injured body, one bad game, one double-team scheme, and the entire defensive architecture becomes porous at exactly the moments that decided last year's wins.

The Williams return matters. Of course it does. A functional offense keeps games close enough for the defense to matter, and Caleb Williams is a different caliber of quarterback than what Case Keenum can provide. But the defensive end situation is not a problem that Williams's arm can solve. When Green Bay or Minnesota or any offense with a competent coordinator decides to run their protection scheme toward Sweat and attack the other side, Williams being healthy in the pocket doesn't change the math at all. The Bears need a pass rusher who registers on the depth chart as something other than a zero. Right now, they don't have one. That's the number the season is built on, and it's the wrong one.