“We Don’t Either”: Caleb Williams & Matt Eberflus Face a Problem of Plenty as Bears Figure Out Their WR1

The tug-of-war in the WR room has just started in the Bears. Matt Eberflus was a proud, proud head coach striding confidently in the 2024 season practice with 3 elite-level WRs on his team: two veterans, Keenan Allen and DJ Moore, paired with the explosive young Rome Odunze. With all 3 on board, Eberflus saw the ultimate challenge they would encounter post-draft: the position of WR1.

On one hand, he has the two veterans with years of experience, and on the other, a WR packed with agility and explosiveness, pairing perfectly with their new QB. The stakes are high, perfect to test Eberflus’s ability to handle a winning roster for the Bears. However, his first answer as the head coach of the Caleb Williams-Rome Odunze roster left the fans dissatisfied as the HC had no updates to satiate their WR lineup queries.

“I don’t even know who the WR 1 is on this offense,” quipped the Up & Adams host to their guest, Matt Eberflus. A clueless Matt Eberflus (or pretending to be clueless Eberfluss) responded swiftly with a “We don’t know either.” If Eberflus and Co. are genuinely left to figure out what their wide receiver lineup would be, they’ll need to do it with great surety and equally quickly since it would be a season-pivoting decision.

And if Eberflus is trying to heighten the enigma surrounding their most-awaited announcement post-draft, it’s working. Whatever it may be, the decision would be the make-or-break point of the Bears’ future. It will also define Matt Eberflus’s excellence as a head coach since a former WR has already passed her verdict on a better WR with Caleb Williams.

How does the Caleb Williams-Rome Dounze pair look?

During his workout sessions with Caleb Williams, Keenan Allen, and DJ Moore, former Bengals’ WR T.J. Houshmandzadeh was sure what he wanted for this QB. “If Rome makes it to No. 9, the Bears will draft him,” he had predicted, and it turned out to be excellently true.

Now that he has Odunze and Williams together, Houshmandzadeh is elated. “And so I’m just glad that it happened. And that little chemistry that they were working on now will be developed and honed in on,” he confessed. The person who trained Williams in the off-season has passed the verdict, whether Matt Eberflus would stick to it or not is the real question.

Houshmandzadeh has the perfect plan for the Odunze-Williams pair to follow in their practice to achieve perfection. “If you do these two things, you’re going to have a great career: separation at the top of the route and beating press coverage. That’s what we work on every single day until we get it, and we never really get it,” Houshmandzadeh said. If the former WR trains this duo to be unbeatable, Matt Eberflus would be left with no other option but to select Odunze as WR1.