One thing is abundantly clear at this stage in the Chicago Bears’ miserable 4-10 season, where they’ve lost eight games in a row.
A despondent Caleb Williams should’ve listened to his dad’s prescient candor.
In case you forget what Carl Williams once told GQ, he viewed the NFL Draft process as a flawed, broken model of what it really should be. With his talented son projected as a future top draft pick, Williams characterized the whole draft model as “completely backward.” Why? It sets up talented players like Caleb Williams to fail by throwing them into impossible situations on some of the NFL’s most dysfunctional teams.
Furthermore, it was suggested that Carl might have had his son pull an “Eli Manning” — meaning, refuse to go to a specific team in the draft — rather than risk ruining his pro football future with an incompetent organization that would NOT do everything to maximize his gifts.
The Williams family did none of that. In fact, Caleb went as far as to directly quell concerns about him not wanting to go to Chicago. He wanted all the smoke as the player who would finally break the Bears’ miserable cycle of torturing doe-eyed quarterbacks.
Ironic, isn’t it? As Williams increasingly looks more and more defeated, with his confidence getting shattered by the week, both the senior and junior Williams are reaping what they sowed:
Troy Aikman on a rough night and season for Caleb Williams.
"I was 0-11 as a starter and he's had a much better rookie season than I had."
"He was grimacing and in an enormous amount of pain. When you watch him, you can tell that he's a defeated guy." pic.twitter.com/Vv91cKVm9F
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) December 17, 2024
Carl Williams was right. The NFL Draft process does not skew toward putting talented young football prospects in a position to succeed. If anything, especially with quarterbacks, it asks them to fight an uphill battle at a time when they’re supposed to be learning good habits. With the respective resurgences of Baker Mayfield, Geno Smith, and Sam Darnold on new teams, we have more evidence than ever that amateurish organizations break raw quarterbacks most of the time.
It’s not the other way around.
There’s still plenty of time for Caleb Williams to achieve everything he wanted as the Bears quarterback. He may well become a superstar franchise player that has Chicago in perennial championship contention. No one is writing it off this early in his career. (That is, until we see the next Bears head coach.)
But the Bears themselves have lost the benefit of the doubt on this front. Just like every other quarterback who has walked into their building over the last four decades, there is little to suggest they’re not going to screw up Williams, too. Until further notice, the burden of proof is on them to simply suggest they won’t. Suffice it to say, the Williams family could’ve avoided all of this mess by turning his draft process into more of a public circus as they eventually spurned the Bears.
The short-term pain and drama would’ve been worth the long-term benefit: avoiding an inept organization that has no earthly idea about how to develop quarterbacks and, at this point, probably never will.
