Quarterback Caleb Williams cast a pall over the Bears’ seemingly successful offseason last week without saying a word.
It apparently will stay that way Wednesday. Williams is not expected to be among the Bears players made available to the media after the team’s OTA practice, six days after a bombshell report that detailed how he and his father Carl considered forcing their way to the rival Vikings before last year’s draft.
Of course, that won’t make the topic go away. The Vikings are the Bears’ Week 1 opponent.
Williams’ head coach — and his teammates — figure to be pressed on the subject Wednesday. For Ben Johnson, a first-time head coach who has never before been the face of a franchise, tackling his first tempest will be a test his predecessors could never quite pass. Matt Eberflus’ inability to tamp down the smallest of fires only hastened the dysfunction inside Halas Hall.
That same dysfunction, on and off the field, made the Williams family dubious of the Bears. Williams met with Vikings head coach Kevin O’Connell at the NFL Scouting Combine before last year’s draft and told his father he wanted to play for them, according to author Seth Wickersham’s upcoming book “American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback.”
Carl Williams didn’t want his son to be drafted first overall by the Bears, believing that Chicago was “where quarterbacks go to die,” per the book. Caleb Williams wasn’t comfortable with offensive coordinator Shane Waldron, who was hand-picked by Eberflus.
The Williams family considered steering the quarterback away from the Bears with a hostile public relations offensive before Caleb Williams decided he “wasn’t ready to nuke the city,” the book said. After visiting Halas Hall in April 2024, just weeks before the draft, Williams told his father he was comfortable becoming a Bear.
Williams and his father’s initial concerns proved prescient —Eberflus and Waldron were fired before December. The Bears replaced the former with Johnson, who was Williams’ preferred head coaching candidate this offseason, to guide the former No. 1 overall pick.
How much does Johnson’s hiring assuage the concerns Williams and his family had about the Bears? Did last season’s debacle reinforce the fact that the Williams family’s initial concerns were correct? Is the quarterback that created his own bear claw hand signal and who muttered the phrase “Da Bears” at the end of every press conference last year truly happy here?
Those are questions only Williams can answer the next time he speaks publicly, likely near the end of the Bears’ offseason program, which started Tuesday and will run three days a week for the next month.
Until then, people will speculate. They have been since Thursday, finding ways to blame both the quarterback and the franchise. ESPN firebrand Stephen A. Smith blamed the Bears, saying they “should be apologizing to the city of Chicago and the National Football League for being so inept for so many years when it came to picking a damn quarterback.”
Boomer Esiason, the former Bengals quarterback turned radio host, ripped Williams, bemoaning what he called a culture of entitlement.
“Now it’s on his ass,” Esiason said Friday. “It’s going to be on his ass to live up to these so-called lofty expectations that he has for himself and that his father has for his son.
“I understand that there could be a discussion, ‘Hey, this is where quarterbacks go to die.’ Well, go fix it. Be the reason that the team is going to turn it around, and you be the player that you think you are.”