GREEN BAY, Wis. — Cole Kmet was as open as a tailgate Leinenkugel’s.
When quarterback Caleb Williams rolled to his left on fourth-and-one from the Packers’ 14 with 27 seconds left to play Sunday, the Bears tight end ran the same corner route that he turned into a touchdown one game earlier in Philadelphia.
The Packers fell for it, just as the Eagles did, crashing toward the line of scrimmage and focusing on running back D’Andre Swift in the left flat.
By the time Kmet’s route reached the 2-yard line, the closest defender, cornerback Keisean Nixon, was four yards behind him. All Williams had to do was what he did the week before — loft the ball and lead the tight end into the back left corner of an otherwise empty end zone. A touchdown and extra point would have tied the game — or coach Ben Johnson could have gone to two to try to bury the Bears’ rival.
Instead, Williams left the throw short.
He rolled left, planted his right foot exactly halfway between the 2 and the 0 painted on the half-frozen turf at Lambeau Field, and couldn’t manage enough strength to throw the ball over Nixon’s head. The cornerback leapt, intercepted the pass and sealed the 28-21 win in the 211th Bears-Packers game Sunday night.
“In those moments, you want to put the ball in play and trust your guy — or try to have your guy make a play,” Williams said. “Just gotta give him a better ball.”
It wasn’t a hard throw, Williams said. Throwing while rolling left is supposed to be his superpower. Last week, quarterbacks coach J.T. Barrett said that only Patrick Mahomes does it better, joking that Williams “freaky stuff in his body where he can rotate that torso and flick it like it ain’t nothin.’”
In a season that has mostly gone right for the Bears, though, the throw went wrong Sunday, preventing Williams from his sixth fourth-quarter comeback. It knocked the 9-4 Bears from the top seed in the NFC to the last team in the playoffs, were the season to end today.
“I thought I was pretty open. …” Kmet said “There’s a million other things going on that Caleb’s gotta dissect in front of him. A tough way to end it, obviously.”
The start wasn’t so great, either. Williams’ struggles in the first half combined with a porous pass defense to give the Packers a 14-3 lead at halftime. Twenty-two minutes into the game, Williams was 1-for-7 for two yards. He went 6-for-14 for 32 yards in the first half, with 10 of those yards coming on a third-and-19 checkdown with 10 seconds left in the first half.
He was remarkable after halftime, though, going 13-for-21 for two touchdowns and a 96.1 passer rating in the second half. Williams credited a quick halftime reset in which the Bears reminded each other to focus on the details.
“It’s frustration, because we shot ourselves in the foot more than anything,” he said.
If the Bears are a playoff team, they can’t afford for Williams to turn in another dud of a half. They need to at least split their final four games to feel comfortable with their playoff chances.
“I need to start faster, we need to start faster,” Williams said. “I think that would do us well as a team — and as an offense, especially.”
In the first half, the Bears struggled to keep pace with Packers quarterback Jordan Love, who finished the game 17-for-25 for 234 yards, three touchdowns and a 120.7 passer rating. In the second half, Williams eclipsed him — the Bears’ three possessions before the final interception ended in two touchdowns and a field goal. He rolled right and threw a one-yard touchdown pass to a diving Olamide Zaccheaus in the third quarter and found tight end Colston Loveland for a one-yard touchdown midway through the fourth quarter.
Josh Jacobs ran for a two-yard touchdown on third down with 3:32 left to give the Packers a seven-point lead. He’d kept the drive alive when he bounced off a Gervon Dexter tackle that would have forced fourth down, plowing forward for a 21-yard gain.
Down 28-21, Williams inherited the ball at the 26 and promptly hit Luther Burden down the left sideline for 27 yards. Two plays later, he scrambled right and found little-used receiver Devin Duvernay crossing from left to right. The 24-yard pass gave the Bears the ball at the Packers’ 23 at the two-minute warning.
“Caleb was doing everything he could,” coach Ben Johnson said. “He put his Superman cape on a few times to not go down and extend the play.”
Wanting to bleed clock and lean on a run game that ground down the Packers in the second half, Johnson called three-straight handoffs to Kyle Monangai — for six yards, three yards, and then no gain.
The two sides exchanged timeouts to plan for fourth-and-one at the 14. When Williams rolled left, he saw three defenders keying on Swift. The Packers trailed Williams with a defender, too, taking away his ability to scramble for the yard.
“We had a lot of options there,” Johnson said.
The one Williams chose didn’t work.
“It’s not always going to work in our favor,” Williams said. “We work our tail off to try and not have these situations, but when the situations do come, we got to try and go make plays and try and come back and make the right plays to seal the win.”
Caleb Williams was late throwing to an open Cole Kmet on the game’s climactic play, a mistake that might not have been deadly had the QB gotten going sooner.
Sanders completed 23 of 42 passes and was the Browns’ first rookie quarterback since Baker Mayfield to have a 300-yard game.
