When Jayden Daniels embraced Caleb Williams on the field after their Week 8 heartstopper last season, the two quarterbacks couldn’t have known how decisively their paths were about to diverge.
Daniels, the Washington Commanders star who was drafted No. 2 in 2024, threw the winning Hail Mary and walked into a spotlight that kept getting brighter as he won Offensive Rookie of the Year and led the Commanders to the NFC Championship Game. It was one of the greatest seasons in NFL history for a rookie quarterback.
Williams, the top pick in ’24, walked into a mess. It was the first of 10 straight losses for the Bears, who would fire head coach Matt Eberflus and offensive coordinator Shane Waldron along the way.
Daniels and Williams meet again Monday night (8:15 p.m., ABC) against the backdrop of Washington’s 18-15 win last Oct. 27.
The Commanders (3-2) are trying to keep pace in the NFC East while the Bears (2-2) have won two in a row and are coming off their bye.
ESPN’s Bears reporter Courtney Cronin, Commanders reporter John Keim, senior writer Seth Wickersham, NFL draft analyst Jordan Reid, NFL analyst Aaron Schatz, analytics analyst Seth Walder and NFL insider Jeremy Fowler break down the rivalry from various perspectives, including how that one game last year impacted the QBs between then and now.
Keim: Daniels did not change. Network morning shows reached out to have him on; he declined. Several days later he said he was “onto the new week.” He showed up to work at the same time each day: around 5:30 a.m.
But for others, it created a legend: franchise savior heaves 52-yard scoring pass with a broken rib that knocked him out of the previous game in the first quarter. “He’s unfazed by those things and will do anything to win,” quarterbacks coach Tavita Pritchard said.
Daniels already was the front-runner for Offensive Rookie of the Year before solidifying his status in that game with a career-high 326 yards. In his six full games before facing the Bears, he’d thrown six touchdown passes and rushed for four. After that game, he threw 18 touchdown passes.
But this wasn’t about stats. It was about belief. The impact was less on Daniels and much more on those around him.
“Whenever you do something like that,” said punter Tress Way, the franchise’s longest-tenured player, “coming off some of these incredible performances … there’s just this sense of we always have a shot. We’ve got him. You never know what he’s going to do, and he’s in our uniform.”
Cronin: Lost in the chaos was what Williams did on the possession before the Commanders’ game-winning drive. Chicago took the lead for the first time when Williams led a 10-play, 62-yard touchdown drive capped off by a successful 2-point conversion. It would have gone down as the first fourth-quarter comeback of his NFL career.
Instead, the result started a spiral.
Four days after the Washington game, Commanders defensive coordinator Joe Whitt Jr. blamed himself for putting the team in position to have to win on a Hail Mary. Williams’ father, Carl, quote-tweeted a video clip from Whitt’s news conference with the hashtags: #accountability and #realcoach. He quickly deleted the post.
Closing out games was a struggle for the Bears throughout Williams’ rookie season. Weeks after the Washington loss, Chicago had chances to win in the fourth quarter and overtime in consecutive games against the Green Bay Packers, Minnesota Vikings and Detroit Lions, and lost them all.
Williams struggled to get his team off the mat in back-to-back losses at Arizona and against New England following the Washington game. Williams was sacked a season-high nine times by a Patriots pass rush that was one of the NFL’s worst.
Cameras caught an awkward interaction between Waldron and Williams on the sideline at the end of the New England game when the offensive coordinator seemed to be smiling while the quarterback looked frustrated. Waldron was fired two days later.
Williams ended his season with a walk-off win in Green Bay — snapping the 10-game skid — and a declaration for what he wanted in his next head coach.
“A coach that challenges us,” Williams said. “A man of his word. A disciplined coach … Just helping us and finding ways to win.”
The Bears hired former Lions OC Ben Johnson to his first head coaching job on Jan. 21.
Keim: Washington offensive coordinator Kliff Kingsbury often repeats one quote to his staff and his players: “The biggest hindrance to success is not failure, it’s boredom.” Those who succeed embrace that boredom — when it comes to making decisions and how they approach each work day — which partly explains why Daniels has been consistent.
He shows up at the same time each day, goes through the same routines — whether it’s walk-throughs with coaches at 6 a.m. or his pregame routine — and, despite having flash in his play, is OK making routine throws.
“I like the saying of don’t get bored making the right decisions,” Pritchard said. “Routines can feel monotonous and ho-hum, but that’s what allows you to keep coming back, good bad or indifferent. That’s him.”
Backup QB Marcus Mariota said the Commanders didn’t ask Daniels to be something he wasn’t, nor did they want to force leadership on him before he was ready.
“A lot of times when guys are drafted high, they’re asked to be formed into maybe a player the staff had previously been with,” Mariota said. “More times than not it doesn’t work out well.
“This team has done a great job of allowing him to be himself and put him in position where he’s comfortable and confident and can go play at a high level.”
Cronin: Before the Bears drafted Williams, general manager Ryan Poles described quarterbacks as being either “artists” or “surgeons.” The artists are the creative types who don’t “draw within the lines” such as Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson, whereas surgeons are the Tom Brady and Peyton Manning types who operate from the pocket and play within structure.
Getting Williams to adhere to the surgeon role was a priority for Johnson and his staff during the offseason.
“Now we’re asking him to be a little bit more structured in terms of the playcalls,” Johnson said in July. “Sometimes there’s multiple calls. There’s shifts, there’s motions, there’s a lot more going on mentally than probably there’s ever been for him.”
Some of Williams’ inconsistencies in the early portion of his career were related to being late on throws, often the byproduct of holding onto the ball too long, passing up the checkdown — all things Williams has acknowledged over the past 18 months.
“It’s not perfect yet,” Johnson said. “There’s still a number of plays where our eyes aren’t quite in the right position or we’re holding onto the ball just a tick longer than what we’re coaching. But I did see tremendous growth in terms of going through the progression.”
After back-to-back wins against Dallas and Las Vegas before Chicago’s Week 5 bye, Williams noticed improvement.
“I would just say my footwork, and then just being more comfortable with everything that Ben and the guys have thrown at me,” he said, “just being able to grasp it all, but also be able to go out there and play a game and play it well for the team.”
Walder on Williams: I’ll give you two related ones from this season: 23% off-target rate and minus-10% completion percentage over expectation (per NFL Next Gen Stats). Those are both the worst in the league among QBR-qualifying quarterbacks, and they tell the same story — accuracy problems.
Granted, it’s a small-ish sample, but both numbers are a step back from where he was a year ago (21% and minus-1%, respectively) during his disappointing rookie campaign. Williams has to sort out his accuracy woes because they are the top factor holding back the passing offense from greatness.
I mean that last part sincerely, because Williams is being very well supported. He’s getting good pass protection (Bears rank fourth in pass block win rate) and has receivers who are consistently getting open in Johnson’s offense. If he could simply get his passes to sail off course only at an average rate, I think the conversation around him would change in a hurry.
On Daniels: Whether this is a sign of Daniels’ instant growth as a rookie, regression as a sophomore or simply random variance remains to be seen, but a stat I am watching with him is his efficiency on late downs.
In his rookie season (including playoffs), Daniels’ production on early downs was actually quite pedestrian, with a 53.5 QBR that ranked 15th best. But on late downs, that jumped to 94.9 — best among all quarterbacks. The latter number drove his overall efficiency numbers to the moon because late downs are where the leverage lies. Which was the true Daniels?
On one hand, that split could have been seen as a red flag, since the sample of early-down plays was almost twice as large as the late-down plays. On the other hand, those third and fourth downs are probably a better indicator of skill because they occur when the opponent often knows the quarterback is dropping back to pass.
Here’s why I bring this all up today: Thus far in a limited three-game sample in 2025, Daniels’ early-down numbers are almost identical to what he did a year ago. But third and fourth down? It’s flipped the other way. He has a 23.6 QBR on those plays and a massive 36% off-target rate then, too. I don’t think we should overreact to those numbers yet; we’re talking about literally 39 plays. But it’s worth monitoring.
Reid: With Williams, it was how he struggled with his ball placement to start this season. One of his best attributes coming into the 2024 draft was his precise accuracy. Yes, he needed to show more discipline within structure, but when he trusted the process of playing inside of the pocket, his completion percentage was always well above average.
Daniels, meanwhile, jumped out to a fast start and still has an early lead as the best QB of the loaded 2024 class. How quickly the poise and calm demeanor of Daniels translated to the NFL came as a major surprise, being that he took the Commanders all the way to the NFC Championship Game as a rookie. It’s rare to see a young quarterback not only experience that level of success in the regular season but also continue it into his first-ever postseason. Finding a franchise quarterback had been at the top of the checklist for Washington, and the early success of Daniels has positioned the Commanders as true contenders in the NFC for the foreseeable future.
Fowler: The Bears did “due diligence” on Daniels before the draft, according to a source involved in the process. They met with Daniels at the NFL combine.
Those interviews are typically 15 minutes in length, during which teams can quiz the prospect on football strategy or get to know him personally.
While Chicago did not fly Daniels to team headquarters for a predraft visit, the front office made calls to Daniels’ camp to ask about the player, as is customary in the draft process.
“They were very vocal very early about taking Caleb, but going through the draft process, with the likely No. 2 pick (Daniels) to evaluate, they did their due diligence,” the source said.
Going No. 1 was not a focus for Daniels, the source added, so he didn’t stump for Chicago in the process. He liked the Washington situation and was comfortable with his spot in the draft.
Schatz: The range of possibilities for Daniels is still very wide. Based on my DYAR (defense-adjusted yards above replacement) metric, Daniels had the fourth-most-valuable rookie quarterback season since 1978.
Comparing Daniels to the other players around him on the top-10 list shows how many paths his career could still take. Daniels’ passing value as a rookie was roughly equivalent to Peyton Manning’s in 1998. Imagine a passer as good as Manning who was also a great mobile scrambler. That’s a slim possibility, but it’s one end of the range.
Daniels’ season was also similar to Robert Griffin III’s rookie season. There are a lot of variables that could send a player’s career off course, including injuries, coaching decisions and roster moves. Griffin suffered torn ligaments in his right knee in the 2012 playoffs, and he believes trying to play through injury altered his career.
Or it could be something in the middle, perhaps an inconsistent career like Dak Prescott’s where Daniels is an MVP contender some years and an average starting quarterback in others.
Wickersham: I was with Williams shortly after Johnson was hired. We were in Jacksonville. He was doing a light workout, and I was fact-checking material for my book about quarterbacks (“American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback”).
It had been a tough rookie season for him — fulfilling a premonition of his father, Carl. But if a rookie season for a quarterback is mostly about survival, Caleb had survived indeed.
Now, with Johnson in the building, he knew he had a chance to live up to expectations of the team and of himself. He had just undergone minor wrist surgery, but he picked up a football and gently threw with his private quarterback coach, Will Hewlett, and his physical therapist, Tom Gormely.
He has a beautiful arm. I thought of the moment most of us saw on draft night in 2024, when the Bears picked Williams. When he was in high school, Caleb decided he was going to be the first pick in the draft, and worked backward from there. Think about the gall it required, the rigorous self-belief and borderline delusion. And yet: He did it. And as he glided onto stage to see Roger Goodell after his name was announced, he let loose a howl that was years in the making. It was pure elation — rare elation.
He said that when Johnson was hired, he howled again. That day, I asked him if it was the same type of scream, same type of feeling, as the one on draft night, pure and rare. “Yes,” he said with a smile as he threw. “It was.”