The series finale of ‘Hard Knocks: Training Camp with the Chicago Bears’ aired Tuesday night as the new-look team puts training camp and the preseason in the rearview and goes full speed ahead toward the 2024 NFL season.
As expected Caleb Williams, the No. 1 overall selection in the 2024 NFL draft, was one of the key figures in the series.
The series also featured Bears safety Jonathan Owens on FaceTime with Olympic champion gymnast Simone Biles while she was in Paris (Episode 1) and then visiting Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever (Episode 5).
Here are the highlights of this season’s docuseries featuring the Bears on HBO:
Caleb Williams looks the part as QB1
Chicagoland’s pro football hopes and dreams ride on the prolific skills of Caleb Williams, who looked the part of a franchise quarterback on ‘Hard Knocks.’ And, maybe, he will be the guy to break through the franchise’s poor history at the position.
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Bears fans don’t need to be reminded of the fact that Chicago is the only NFL team to never have a quarterback throw for 4,000 or more yards in a single season or for 30 or more touchdowns (Erik Kramer came the closest at 3,838 yards and 29 TDs, and that was nearly three decades ago during the 1995 season). Bears fans also don’t need to be reminded that their ancient rivals to the north, the Green Bay Packers, have had a total of 18 4,000-yard passing seasons produced by five different quarterbacks.
After the first ‘Hard Knocks’ episode showed some training camp ups and downs for the rookie quarterback, it was nothing but good vibes once Williams started playing in preseason games.
Williams left his best for last, an electric eight-play, 90-yard touchdown drive that featured a spectacular 45-yard completion to fellow rookie Rome Odunze and later a touchdown scramble.
In the spotlight for much of this edition of ‘Hard Knocks,’ Williams will be under an even more intense microscope when the Bears open Week 1 against the Tennessee Titans at Soldier Field on Sunday.
Ryan Poles building a winner
As a general manager, the draft picks you make and trades you pull off define your tenure with a team.
Given the draft and free-agent capital invested into the 2024 edition of the Bears, both team and general manager Ryan Poles are entering a crucial season after an ambitious roster overhaul.
Poles scored what might go down as one of the most lopsided trades in league history when he shipped the No. 1 pick in the 2023 draft to the Carolina Panthers in exchange for a 2024 first-rounder and wide receiver D.J. Moore. While Moore had a career year for the Bears, the Panthers were securing the No. 1 pick for Chicago.
Poles kicked the tires on another big trade during training camp, with NFL Films and HBO being able to capture the efforts to acquire pass rusher Matthew Judon from the New England Patriots. Judon wound up getting traded to the Atlanta Falcons, as the Bears wanted a contract extension with the player before making the deal.
While that trade didn’t materialize, Poles has built a Bears team that could contend for a playoff spot (two of seven USA TODAY Sports experts predict Chicago to be a wild-card team).
Poles’ candor and vulnerability (more on that later) made for a compelling character on this season’s ‘Hard Knocks.’
Bears now in an unfamiliar position
Poles, head coach Matt Eberflus and the rest of Bears’ braintrust now appear to be in the enviable position of having a franchise quarterback in place for years to come.
In Tuesday’s ‘Hard Knocks’ finale, Poles was shown on hand to scout players at Saturday’s big Georgia-Clemson game. He ran into a familiar face: Giants general manager Joe Schoen, of ‘Hard Knocks: Offseason with the New York Giants’ fame. Schoen’s quarterback situation is shaky at best with starter Daniel Jones returning from a major knee surgery, and the offseason ‘Hard Knocks’ showed how the Giants had discussed possibly trading up the draft for one of this year’s highly touted passers.
‘Gotta be nice,’ Schoen told Poles, ‘not to be looking at the, uh …’
‘Quarterbacks?’ Poles answered. ‘Hopefully it stays that way for a long time.’
Where were the F-bombs?
Last year’s ‘Hard Knocks’ with the New York Jets was littered with f-bombs, with the primary culprit being head coach Robert Saleh.
If you noticed something was missing from this year’s ‘Hard Knocks’ with the Bears, you weren’t alone.
Episodes since the last f-bomb on ‘Hard Knocks’: 5.
With the Bears, there were no fiery f-bomb laden tirades from head coaches of years past like Saleh, Jon Gruden, Jeff Fisher and Rex Ryan (who can forget the famous ‘Let’s go eat a (expletive) snack’ rant?).
Jarvis Landry’s unforgettable 1,080-word tirade in a receivers meeting with the Cleveland Browns in 2018 contained 23 f-bombs.
That’s a lot of f-bombs in less than two minutes.
And 23 more f-bombs than were heard from the Bears. Why was that?
Turns out, HBO didn’t air any profanity out of respect for the McCaskey family, which owns the Bears. Also, apparently the Bears don’t use a lot of swears in general.
‘I’ll be honest, this team curses much less than any other team I’ve been around, but it is out of respect for the McCaskey family,’ ‘Hard Knocks’ director Shannon Furman said on the CHGO podcast. ‘It’s something that they don’t do and wouldn’t want to see it. So it’s kind of a decision that was made out of respect for the (McCaskey family) letting us in their house and wanting to be respectful to them.’
NFL’s cutdown day takes an emotional toll
Last year, the Jets hamstrung NFL Films and HBO by not allowing access to the head coach and general manager as they made personnel decisions and cut players.
This year, the Bears dove head-first into the inner-workings of the NFL’s annual mass sacrifice, with that poignant drama playing out in the season’s final episode, airing one week after the Aug. 27 cutdown deadline day.
Bears general manager Ryan Poles was himself a training camp cut back in 2008 after joining Chicago as an undrafted offensive lineman out of Boston College, and finds the cutdown day process to be grueling – ‘To me, it’s one of the worst days of this job. It’s hard to tell that many people that their dream is ending.’
‘I’ve been there. It’s a place where I try to have a lot of empathy in the way that we communicate it, because these guys have put a lot of time and effort into making a football team,’ Poles said. ‘What I try to do is doing a really good job giving feedback, so they at least they know the ‘why’ behind it and they can continue to work on their craft and hopefully have an opportunity at some point to make a football team.’
The Bears gave a few familiar names a cutdown day sendoff.
One by one players met with the Bears’ braintrust – wide receiver and Hall of Fame Game star Collin Johnson, the ‘Canadian Eagle’ Theo Benedet, quarterbacks Brett Rypien and Austin Reed, introspective defensive back Adrian Colbert.
It was Colbert’s release – and the emotional toll it took on Poles – that played at the heart of ‘Hard Knocks’ viewers. After Colbert takes a seat in the general manager’s office, a tearful Poles excuses himself for a moment to collect himself. There’s silence as Colbert patiently waits, knowing full well what’s to come.
‘I appreciate you, man. There’s something about you that’s different,’ Poles tells Colbert, whose harrowing childhood story was told on last week’s ‘Hard Knocks.’ ‘I hate that we got to do this. There’s some guys you just root for, and you’re one of them. You’re a good dude, a great teammate. It’s part of this job that I hate. Thankful for our time together.
‘There’s certain people who have something about them that’s special. And you do. Wherever your career takes you from here, I hope you do big things.’
Colbert expresses how much he appreciated the opportunity with the Bears, the 10th NFL team he’s been with. The two embrace and Colbert leaves the office and into the pro football unknown.
It was one of the most heart-wrenching scenes in ‘Hard Knocks’ history.
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