How Bears coaches evaluate Caleb Williams' early camp struggles

Cosell pointed out how some practices or even preseason games might be designed to test a particular player or players with specific aspects of the game.

"You want to see players perform better than worse, obviously, but what coaches do very often in training camp is they put players—particularly younger players—in intentionally difficult situations.

"You know that you don't want to find out about a player, how he deals with a particular situation, Week 1 or Week 3 or Week 4," Cosell said. "That's not how you want to find out."

This is exactly the situation regarding Williams from earlier practices when the Bears defense was coming at him with edge rushes and blitzes as they tried to test how he handles these tactics by defenses.

It was at this point when Williams had some of his worst practices. They even had a practice where edges were allowed to come in almost untouched intentionally to see if Williams could get the ball quickly to the hot read or out to a receiver in a screen without an intentional grounding or getting sacked.

"I've had coaches tell me that with a quarterback, ayoung quarterback, we want him to fail in training camp because failing leads to learning," Cosell told Tucker.

It becomes very much an individualized effort in preseason games.

"It always depends on the player," Cosell said.

In preseason games, coaches aren't looking at the score or even sometimes down and distance. They're often putting individual players in tough matchup situations only to evaluate them and compare them with other players.

When it comes to roster battles and starting battles, the preseason games and practices do matter. Otherwise, how else do they judge players vying with each other for a job than how they hold up in competition? But the 12 practices prior to the first preseason game hold as much importance individually to the game. It becomes just like another practice to a coach.

Bad statistics for Williams overall in Sunday's game may not mean as much as how he's performing against particular defensive looks in practices. It's all individualized.

Yet, what fans are looking at individually may not be what coaches are evaluating. For that reason, there will be inevitable overreaction Sunday to whatever Williams does against the Dolphins.

It's already been the case on a day to day basis with his performance in training camp, which has been anything but a case of linear improvement but has been gradually better over the course of camp.