Williams Coming Back Doesn't Solve the Defense. Nothing Does.

The good news, if you want to call it that: Caleb Williams is apparently close to returning. The bad news is the problem that's been eating this team alive has nothing to do with who's taking snaps under center.

Look at the defensive end depth chart. Montez Sweat sits at the top with every meaningful snap to his name. Behind him, Dayo Odeyingbo is listed — and is currently questionable. That's the rotation. One healthy body at the position most responsible for disrupting opposing quarterbacks, with a question mark behind him and nothing after that. I've been writing about this defensive collapse in different forms for weeks now, and the number that keeps pulling me back is the same one it started with: zero rank-2 defensive ends with any meaningful playing time this season. A typical rotation carries two. Chicago is running one, on the edge of none.

Here's why Williams returning doesn't fix that. The Bears' 2025 season was built on close-game execution — they won eleven percentage points more games than their underlying performance predicted. That kind of margin depends on two things going right simultaneously: your offense converting when it has to, and your defense making stops when the game is on the line. Getting Williams back addresses the first half of that equation. The second half — the stops — requires a pass rush that can actually threaten quarterbacks in the fourth quarter. A one-man edge is not a pass rush. It's a dare.

The Bears signed Marcus Davenport in August specifically to address this. He's gone now. The beat covered that on October 6, and nothing has replaced what he was supposed to provide. Dayo Odeyingbo's questionable tag makes the situation even more precarious — if he can't go, Chicago is genuinely one Sweat injury or foul-out situation away from running interior linemen wide on passing downs and hoping for the best. That's not a contingency plan. That's an absence of one.

What makes this particularly stubborn is that Williams' return — welcome as it is — actually raises the offensive floor while the defensive ceiling stays fixed. The Bears can score more consistently with their franchise quarterback healthy. But the teams they'll need to beat in close games can also score, and if the pass rush can't generate pressure, the secondary — already thin at corner and operating without its marquee safety addition for the first half of the season — will be asked to cover for longer than any secondary can. The 2025 version of this team survived that ask through execution and a little luck. My read is that the 2026 version doesn't have enough margin left to survive it again.

Williams coming back matters. It genuinely does. But the conversation about whether this team can win when it needs to shouldn't be centered on the quarterback. It should be centered on the edge, where there's one name and a question mark, and a whole season's worth of evidence that nothing behind Sweat has been fixed.