Without saying a word last week, quarterback Caleb Williams cast a pall over the Bears’ seemingly successful offseason.
It apparently will stay that way Wednesday. Williams is not expected to be among the players made available to reporters after the Bears’ 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, keeping Williams from the media won’t make the topic go away. The Vikings are the Bears’ Week 1 opponent on Sept. 8 at Soldier Field.
Williams’ new coach and his teammates figure to be pressed on the subject Wednesday. Handling his first tempest will be a test for first-time head coach Ben Johnson that his predecessors never quite passed. In fact, Matt Eberflus’ inability to tamp down the smallest of fires only hastened the dysfunction at Halas Hall.
That same dysfunction, on and off the field, made the Williams family dubious about the Bears. Williams met with Vikings coach Kevin O’Connell at the NFL Scouting Combine before the 2024 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 drafted No. 1 overall by the Bears, believing Chicago was “where quarterbacks go to die,” according to the book. Caleb Williams also wasn’t comfortable with then-Bears offensive coordinator Shane Waldron, who had been hand-picked by Eberflus.
The Williams family considered steering Caleb away from the Bears with a hostile public relations offensive before Caleb decided he “wasn’t ready to nuke the city,” Wicker-sham wrote. After visiting Halas Hall in April, just weeks before the draft, Williams reportedly told his father he was comfortable becoming a Bear.
Their initial concerns proved prescient. Eberflus and Waldron were fired before December. In January, the Bears replaced Eberflus with Johnson, Williams’ preferred head-coaching candidate this offseason.
How much does Johnson’s hiring assuage the concerns the Williams family had? Did last season’s 5-12 debacle — made worse by a two-month, 10-game losing streak — reinforce the family’s initial doubts? Is the quarterback who created his own bear claw hand signal and muttered “Da Bears” at the end of every news 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 offseason program, which started Tuesday and runs three days a week for the next month.
Until then, people will speculate. They have been since Thursday, finding ways to blame both Williams and the Bears. ESPN firebrand Stephen A. Smith faulted 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 QB-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.”