Bears-Bengals Practice Takeaways: Up & Down for Ben Johnson's Offense
The Chicago Bears and Cincinnati Bengals traded blows in a physical joint practice. Find out exactly what happened during Thursay's practice.
Video Transcript
What's going on everybody?
Nicholas Morgiano here from Roundtable Sports.
I'm here in Cincinnati.
The Bears and Bengals had their joint practice, and here's everything you need to know from that practice, offense, defense, first team, second team, that for you, the people, the, the readers, listeners here at Roundtable need to know about.
Let's start with that first team offense in the Chicago Bears.
Came away, I think, a little surprised by how much pressure there was on Caleb Williams, especially given the offensive line that's in front of him.
I thought there was some, whether it was miscommunication up front with Garrett Bradbury, the left guard, right guard, whatever that combination looks like, I think that's something that really was throughout this practice, where Dexter Lawrence is right in front of Caleb Williams, and he has to stop his, his momentum because it would be a sack and the play's blown dead, or there's pressure off the left side where Theo Benedikt is playing left tackle.
And so I just thought that even in the one-on-ones, you saw a little bit of the Bengals defensive line winning some of those reps.
It carried over to the team period.
So I was surprised about that.
But when looking at Caleb Williams' day, he did throw some interceptions.
The very last play of practice, he tries to hit Cole Kmet in the middle of the field.
Ball sails a little high on him, it gets intercepted.
But there were also plays where after the first team offense has a quarterback muffled exchange, he hits Rome Odunze on the left sideline.
Rome comes back to the football, turns around, is able to get an explosive touchdown.
So you saw a little bit of back and forth, I think, from both sides here.
When Joe Burrow and that high-powered offense were going against the Bears defense, which is missing a lot of players in the secondary, guess what?
There were still plays where the Bears defense came out on top.
One of the plays that I saw, Joe Burrow tried to hit Mike Gesicki, a over six foot five target in the middle of the field, gets tipped by Gesicki.
Dylan Thieneman gets an interception on Joe Burrow.
Malik Muhammad had a couple, or had a pass breakup and some good plays in, in his reps at the nickel corner spot.
There was a great play by Jalen Johnson where he's covering up Ja'Marr Chase backside and the play doesn't go for, you know, a positive gain for the Bengals.
So there was this back and forth.
There were other opportunities from Bears.
There were opportunities from the Bengals, and I just think, though, that this practice highlighted that there may be more work to be done for this Bears offense as it's looking for perfection, right?
Th- Ben Johnson talks about the details and, you know, making sure everything's correct.
Well, it definitely didn't seem that way throughout the entirety of this practice.
So I'm curious to see what Ben Johnson, this Bears offense, the approach is going forward for this preseason game on Saturday and then the preseason game and joint practice against the Tennessee Titans.
But great competition.
Make sure you read all ev- all the notes I'll have in today's practice.
But those are just some of the highlight plays that I got to witness here at the Bears-Bengals joint practice.
Make sure you are a member at Bears Roundtable and look through all the content that you're gonna get throughout the day and days as we get closer to Saturday's preseason game against the Cincinnati Bengals.
