The Chicago Bears have locked in the shape of their summer. The team announced its 2026 training camp schedule this week: rookies report to Halas Hall on July 25, veterans follow on July 28, and the first of 10 practices open to the public begins July 31. Fan registration for those free sessions opens Wednesday, July 8, at 10 a.m. CT through Ticketmaster.
The dates worth circling, though, are the two the Bears will spend away from home. Chicago will hold a joint practice with the Cincinnati Bengals on August 20, then travel again six days later for a joint session with the Tennessee Titans on August 26. For a second-year quarterback and a first-year system, those are the most valuable reps on the calendar.
Here is why joint practices matter more than another padded day against your own defense: they give coaches clean, controlled looks at Caleb Williams against a defense that has not spent all spring learning his tendencies. Williams enters year two under head coach Ben Johnson, whose offense asks the quarterback to play with rhythm and to work through built-in answers before the snap. You learn more about whether that is taking hold in two days against Cincinnati and Tennessee than in two weeks of intrasquad work, because the unfamiliarity is the point — it strips away the shortcuts a quarterback and his own defense develop by late August.
The open-practice slate is a fan-friendly one, with celebration days new to 2026 — Kids Day, Celebrating Women & Girls in Sports Day, and Vamos Bears Day among them. But the competitive spine of the schedule is those road sessions, and the timing is deliberate: late August, close enough to the opener that the reps translate, far enough that there is still time to fix what they expose.
For a franchise that has spent recent summers searching for evidence that its quarterback development is on track, the schedule offers something concrete to measure. The report dates are set, the joint practices are booked, and the questions about Williams and Johnson’s offense now have specific days on which they will start getting answered.
What is next: registration opens July 8, camp opens July 25, and the first real tell comes August 20 in Cincinnati.
