An outbreak of exuberance

 Glad tidings out of Buffalo, N.Y., this a.m., and, no, it's not that Buffaloians (Buffaloites?) are still a month or so away from the first blizzard of the season. It's about the Chicago Bears, silly!

Who beat the Bills 33-6 the other night in one of those entirely superfluous NFL preseason games. And guess what?

Their presumptive new franchise quarterback, Caleb Williams, played 20 snaps. And did not remind Bears fans of Bob Avellini, Peter Tom Willis or any other quarterback in the numbingly beige history of Bears quarterbacks.

No, sir. Why, he looked like an actual quarterback!

According to the game story by ESPN's Courtney Cronin, in 20 snaps, Williams completed 4-of-7 passes for 95 yards, a 101.8 passer rating. Two of the three incompletions were drops. He took off on a 13-yard scramble at one point. He hit tight end Cole Kmet with a 26-yard pass that Kmet pronounced "second to none." Wide receiver DJ Moore declared Williams' performance "outstanding," and head coach Matt Eberflus, displaying the requisite head coach's caution, said there was "certainly positivity there," but said there was also a lot of work to do.

This of course will not stop the more exuberant precincts of Bears Nation from declaring "Finally! We've found the next Sid Luckman!"

Weeeelll ...

Allow the Blob, at this point, to remind everyone there've been a lot more Sid Caesars than Sid Luckmans playing quarterback in Chicago across the decades.

Allow me to bring up, say, Justin Fields, who was thought to be the quarterback of the future until he turned out to be the halfback option passer of the future. Or the aforementioned Slo-Mo Bob and Peter Tom. Or even Jay Cutler -- the best Bears quarterback of my lifetime, but also a one-man tropical depression with the leadership qualities of a garden slug.

In other words: Tap the brakes, Chicago. Williams might indeed be all that, and he did indeed look good the other night against whatever warm bodies the Bills had on the field. But let's see what he does against, say, the Packers in November.

Even Williams seemed to be telling everyone to slow the roll after his unveiling.

"There's an understanding that it is preseason, that everybody's not going to show their looks and what they would do versus us and vice versa," he said. "(Now) we take a step back, we go through the tape and then on ... you take it from there and you keep growing, keep growing, keep growing."

And whatever happens, happens.