Bears quarterback Caleb Williams has never climbed a mountain.
He’s about to.
“I wouldn’t say that climbing mountains is intimidating,” he told the Sun-Times in a sitdown interview. “But when you look up, you know you’ve got a long way to go.”
Here’s how steep it is for the No. 1 overall pick: The Bears have won one playoff game since he turned 6. Since he was born on Nov. 18, 2001, the Bears have gone 23 games under .500 in the regular season.
At his position, they have been even worse. The Bears drafted Mitch Trubisky second overall in 2017 and Justin Fields 11th in 2021, yet finished dead last in passing yards from 2017 to 2023.
Their best passing season during Williams’ life came in 2014, when Jay Cutler threw for 3,812 yards — 238th among all NFL quarterback seasons in that timeframe. There have been 186 examples of NFL quarterbacks throwing for 4,000 yards in a season since Williams was born. None were with the Bears.
Before he was drafted in April, Williams had just a passing sense of this history. He didn’t focus too much on it, he said, because the past wasn’t anything he could change. But he had a sliver of context about what he was stepping into.
“Throughout my years of growing up — [and] I’m only 22 right now — the Bears haven’t necessarily been in position, or in that many positions, at least . . . to win the big ones,” he said.
That’s the mountain he’s eyeballing, starting with the season opener Sunday against the Titans — a mountain made from the 50 starting quarterbacks the Bears have used since winning the Super Bowl after the 1985 season, and their losing record since.
“Before you climb the mountain, you set a standard for yourself mentally,” Williams said. “When you get to the point where you feel like you’re going to plateau or you get to the point where you can rest, you rest in bye weeks. And then you look back up the mountain, and you’ve got the rest of that stretch of the season to go.
“You know that that stretch is probably going to be the hardest part. . . . You don’t have much oxygen, you don’t have all these other things. But you do understand that you set the standard for yourself mentally — and for the team.”
Williams’ first season will be the longest of his career.
The rookie wall is so real,” tight end Cole Kmet said.
And the world will be watching.
It did when Williams was the consensus top-rated quarterback recruit in the country while at Gonzaga College High School in Washington, D.C., when he became the first true freshman starting passer at Oklahoma in 31 years and when he won the Heisman Trophy at USC in 2022.
Last summer, the Dodgers made 40,000 Williams bobbleheads and handed them out at a game he attended — an honor reserved for stars the level of Elton John and Kobe Bryant.
“I’ll be honest — it’s sick,” Williams said with a smile.
It wasn’t the first or last time he has had to pinch himself. In fact, he has learned to give himself 24 hours to revel in such moments — just like football coaches preach to their teams after a win.
“If you do right, you win games — I do my job, we win games here — I think those [experiences] are gonna keep growing over time,” Williams said. “It’s not something that you’re necessarily thinking of or trying to aspire to go get or have moments like those. You aspire to go win games and win championships.”
All the attention surrounding Williams — and his being unafraid to embrace it — led Bears teammates to wonder what he’d be like when he first got to Halas Hall. They knew he’d be confident, but they were pleasantly surprised when they found him to also be a team-first football junkie.
“Generational hype,” wide receiver Tyler Scott said. “I just love the fact that he walked in, put his head down and worked. . . . Not all, ‘I’m him.’ He’s the complete opposite. Just kind of humbled himself.”
He clung to veterans. He listened before he spoke up. He knew the importance of small gestures, such as not trying to take No. 13, his USC number, when wide receiver Keenan Allen, who was acquired in March, had worn it for 11 seasons with the Chargers.
“The football — all that’s great,” Scott said. “But the fact you’ve got a great person, a great human being . . . that can have a great work ethic, it just adds even more to who he is.”
When it was time to learn the playbook, Williams picked Allen’s brain over rounds of Monopoly Deal in a team hotel. When the Bears wanted him to focus on voice inflection at the line of scrimmage, he stayed late and screamed audibles over and over.
“It matters to the football team,” guard Teven Jenkins said. “It matters to him.”
Two things excited the Bears the most about adding Williams, general manager Ryan Poles said: his passion for the game and his willingness to work at it.
“It’s always nice to see the work ethic match the desire to be great,” Poles said.
Williams has known hard work from an early age. Starting at 9, and continuing for five years, he’d wake up at 4 a.m., eat the same meal — eggs with ham, an Ensure shake and vitamins — and go work out before school.
“I was crying some mornings,” he said.
His dad, Carl, would encourage and push him, reminding him of the goals he’d set for himself.
“It’s helped me with the years — the long years, the long weeks,” Williams said. “There are [times] when you do it for so long, and then there’s one day when you don’t want to get up. But you get up.”
That followed Williams from grade school to Gonzaga, and from USC’s Heritage Hall to Halas Hall.
“There’s been many people that can throw the ball maybe farther than me, a little bit harder, maybe a little bit more accurate,” he said. “For me to be able to be the quarterback of the Chicago Bears, of the new era of the Chicago Bears, I don’t know how I can’t be appreciative. . . . It’s a special moment for myself and my family and for the Chicago Bears. . . .
“It’s just that you’ve got to come in here and do the work.”
His first major step comes Sunday. He’ll spin his body while running out of the Soldier Field tunnel to see all four corners of the stands and take it all in. Then he’ll get to work.
The mountain awaits.
“We’re at base camp,” Williams said. “We’re packing up all our stuff. We’re ready to go on the climb.”