Caleb Williams’ Running Habits Exposed: Dan Campbell Shares Valuable Intel with Lions’ Defense, Giving…
When quarterbacks become runners, defenses have a challenge on their hands. Some quarterbacks take advantage of any hesitancy, with fake-slides and what not. On Thanksgiving Day, Chicago Bears quarterback Caleb Williams didn’t appreciate a hit he took from Detroit Lions linebacker Jack Campbell along the sideline after he had stopped short of going out of bounds.
Williams is not the first quarterback to take offense to being hit like a normal football player when the situation presents itself (namely, as a runner when in-pocket protections no longer apply), and he won’t be the last.
As a refresher, here’s a clip of the play from last Thursday.
The Lions picked up a tendency Caleb Williams shows as a runner
A huge part of weekly game-planning for coaches is noticing tendencies the upcoming opponent shows. Bigger picture schematic tendencies are obvious, but what a player does in certain situations can be just as important to find.
On this week’s episode of his podcast, Lions wide receiver Amon-Ra St. Brown revealed how Lions head coach Dan Campbell pointed out a tendency Williams shows as a runner near the sideline.
“The craziest part is before the game, in our team meeting, Dan was talking to us, and he was showing clips of Caleb going out of bounds, going in, then going out. He said, ‘No you don’t. No you don’t,’” St. Brown said. “It was clips of him doing that and he was like, ‘If he does this, we’re going to hit his a**. I already warned the refs, the refs know.’ So when it happened in the game, I already knew there was no flag. Jack hit his a**, we were like, ‘Yeah!’ Everyone on the Bears was like, ‘What? Where’s the flag?’ We’re like, ‘He went out, he came back in and took it.’”
