Right before Oklahoma quarterback Caleb Williams ran onto the Cotton Bowl Stadium field late in the first half against Texas on Oct. 9, 2021 — to make Red River rivalry magic, to unseat a superstar starter, to flip the switch on his own, instant greatness — the then-19-year-old true freshman turned to teammate Jalil Farooq, a fellow Sooner from the Washington D.C. area, and made a declaration.
According to the book “5-Star QB: It’s Not About the Stars, It’s About the Journey” by Yogi Roth and Joey Roberts, with Bob Bancroft, Williams uttered five Hollywood-esque words:
“The legend of Caleb begins.”
The Sooners trailed 35-17 in Dallas when coach Lincoln Riley pulled Spencer Rattler, the nation’s No. 1 QB recruit in 2019 who’d backed up Jalen Hurts as a freshman and then been first-team all-Big 12 in 2020. Williams — himself a five-star recruit even though his senior season of high school in D.C. had been canceled due to Covid-19 — came out slinging. He rolled up 300 yards of offense and, making one big throw after another, led a mind-boggling seven scoring drives. Still down 41-33 in the fourth quarter, he skittered forward in a collapsing pocket and heaved the ball 55 yards downfield off one foot to find Marvin Mims in the corner of the end zone for a had-to-see-it-to-believe-it touchdown.
“Are you kidding me!?” announcer Chris Fowler roared. “That’s one for the rocking chair!”
The Sooners won 55-48 to complete their largest Red River comeback ever. Williams — never giving up the job from there — launched himself onto the highest of trajectories.
But he would enter the transfer portal at season’s end and follow Riley to USC, where an even greater level of stardom beckoned. Heading into the 2023 season — coming off a Heisman Trophy campaign with the Trojans — Williams was the subject of a “GQ” profile headlined “The New King of College Football.” In it, a fashion-forward young man whose interests sprawl far beyond football posed for photographs in a tank top from New BedStuy, pants by Rick Owens, a necklace by Greg Ross, a bracelet by Shay Jewelry, rings by David Yurman and Eli Burch Jewelry, a Louis Vuitton jacket, a Gucci jumpsuit, sneakers by Givenchy and — get a load of him — a flowing red skirt by Jil Sander.
In the story, former USC Heisman winners Matt Leinart and Reggie Bush described Williams in gaudy terms. Leinart said Williams — who still had a full season to play — was as NFL-ready as anyone he’d ever seen. Bush likened Williams to Patrick Mahomes, only with more explosive running ability. Williams read for his interviewer from a journaled list of his goals, among them: to become the first pick in the NFL draft and to win eight Super Bowls.
That’s one more than Tom Brady has, for those of you scoring at home.
THE BEARS HAVE TO DECIDE, of course, if Williams is their quarterback of the future. Will Justin Fields get yet another crack at leading the team even though, with Luke Getsy having been fired, he would be working under his third offensive coordinator in four seasons? Or is the 6-1, 215-pound Williams, now 22, just too special to pass up with the No. 1 overall pick?
Those aren’t the only potential outcomes for the Bears at the most important position on any team, but they might as well be given the debate that raged among fans and media nearly every waking moment of a 7-10 season. Barring a surprise development, it will be Fields or Williams, Williams or Fields.
“We love where Justin is right now,” coach Matt Eberflus said Wednesday at his end-of-season press conference with general manager Ryan Poles.
But the Bears are in “information-gathering mode,” as Poles put it, which is another way of saying they’ll slow-play their hand and see how high they can grow the pot for the No. 1 pick before deciding whether or not to trade it. This was the expected and, for now, the only course of action for them to take.
“I did think Justin got better,” Poles said. “I think he can lead this team.”
The two quarterbacks are similar players in at least one key regard: the determination, instinct, knack — whatever it is — to keep plays alive. Williams’ most celebrated moments at USC were, like Fields’ with the Bears, improvisational.
In a 38-27 win against Notre Dame in his Heisman season, Williams was terrific through the air, completing 18 of 22 passes for 232 yards, but even deadlier with his legs, scrambling spectacularly and rushing for three touchdowns as a giddy Fowler, calling this game, too, made “human joystick” cracks. After his first TD run, Williams struck his first Heisman pose.
Having chased after him fruitlessly, Irish linebacker JD Bertrand shook his head and called Williams “freaky.” Coach Marcus Freeman marveled about Williams in terms we’ve heard used to describe Fields.
“His ability to feel pressure, to spin out of it and work upfield, he’s elusive,” Freeman said. “He’s got huge legs — he’s like a running back out there at times — but he has an arm of a great quarterback.”
Halfway into the 2023 campaign, Williams seemed almost unstoppable. A year before, he’d carried the Trojans to a seven-win improvement, from 4-8 without him to 11-3 with him. Now, they were 6-0 and he’d already thrown for 22 touchdowns — with one interception — and rushed for six more. “A flat-out baller,” Deion Sanders had called him after he lit up Colorado for six TDs through the air.
But then the wheels came off; USC lost five of its last six regular-season games as Williams, often running for his life, was sacked at least three times in all six. His offensive line was a problem — and the Trojans’ defense was terrible — and though Williams still played extremely well at times, it often seemed he was holding on to the ball too long. In a 48-20 rout of the Trojans, Notre Dame sacked Williams six times and picked off three of his passes. Even after that, Freeman called him “one of the best college football players that I have ever seen.”
There might not be such a thing as a perfect QB, and Williams is no exception. He’s on the smaller side, smaller than Fields and nowhere close to the prototype size of North Carolina’s Drake Maye, projected to be the second passer off the board in April. ESPN analyst Dan Orlovsky puts Williams’ improvisational ability with Mahomes’, Josh Allen’s and Lamar Jackson’s but questions his fit in a rigidly structured offense. A nearly 10-minute Williams highlight video that has been making the rounds on social media lately includes one play after another on which he exhibits breathtaking skill, but most of the plays are ad-libs. Aren’t those Fields’ specialties, too?
It might simply be the case that Williams is even better than Fields at improvising and at all other aspects of quarterbacking save for breakaway speed. If that’s true, then the Bears probably would be crazy not to hitch their wagon to him. One way or the other, they’ll have to decide.
WILLIAMS QUOTES JAY-Z IN HIS BIO on X, the site formerly known as Twitter:
“I’m Not a Businessman; I’m a Business, Man!”
That he is, arguably more so than any other player in the history of the draft. He is “one of one,” in the words of the aforementioned Roth, a longtime college football analyst and Pac-12 broadcaster who was on the call for four of Williams’ games in 2023 and was the Trojans’ quarterbacks coach under Pete Carroll from 2005 to 2009. Certainly, no one until Williams has had so much success navigating the transfer portal, raking in NIL earnings — upward of $3 million in deals, reportedly, in his final college season — and setting himself up to be an NFL franchise savior.
The Bears or another team will get not merely Williams the player — who calls himself “Superman” in his X bio, too — but Williams the brand. In Los Angeles, where stars are made like nowhere else, he was much more than just a jock phenom with a bobblehead night at Dodger Stadium. He has business deals in the real-estate and fashion spaces. He has endorsement deals with Beats by Dre, Neutrogena and Athletic Brewing Company, among many others. He is very active in his Caleb Cares Foundation, which is dedicated to eliminating bullying, increasing mental-health awareness and “empowering the underdog.”
“He has interests outside of football, that’s for sure,” said Jordan Moore, USC football’s radio pregame host and sideline reporter and the school’s chief creative officer and director of social media for athletics. “The guy spends his free time going to Formula 1 races in Europe. He’s a diverse thinker. He’s going to do fashion shows in [New York’s] Bryant Park, jet off to Europe.
“He’s just a new wave of athlete that’s coming. I think he’s the true, next-generation athlete. Whatever the generation after Gen Z is, to me, he’s the first real star.”
As players begin to enter drafts with more and more wealth accumulated during their college years, and as more and more of the world becomes accessible to them, the question of who is dedicated enough to football and who isn’t — who loves it enough and who doesn’t — will be paramount. In this regard, the Bears will study Williams closely.
An oft-heard refrain in college football is that it isn’t about the X’s and O’s; it’s about the Jimmys and the Joes. Recruiting and talent beat everything else.
As NFL teams look at draft prospects, though, they’ll want to know about the “gimmes” and the “nos.” What opportunities did star players take advantage of — and stay away from — and how, if at all, did it play into their performances on the field and the effects of their presences within their programs?
A decade ago, Max Browne was a five-star QB recruit at USC. Today, he’s an analyst whose broadcasting duties include radio on USC game days and hosting Riley’s coach’s show. He describes Williams as “very business-savvy but also genuine and authentic” and well-liked by teammates. But asked if there should be any concern about the balance Williams strikes between football and non-football pursuits, Brown hesitated.
“That would be the point I’d try to flesh out if I were a GM,” he said.
Roth, on the other hand, maintains that any such concerns are “drastically inaccurate.”
“I think it’s healthy if a quarterback wants to leverage football to set up the rest of his life,” Roth said. “If people think that’s a distraction, to me, I think that’s an inappropriate statement. I think a downfall sometimes for these quarterbacks is their entire identity is attached to the position.
“Just because Caleb has interests in travel or fashion or food doesn’t mean he doesn’t have an insane commitment to the craft. His commitment is as good as anyone’s in my 20 years of converting the sport. He’s a film junkie. He takes care of his mind and body as well as anyone I’ve been around.”
AND THEN THERE’S THE CRITICISM that inevitably comes with being a Bears quarterback. Perhaps no one knows more about that than Fields, who seems to be loved by teammates and liked by fans on the whole — he gives it his all, withstands massive hits, rarely complains or makes anything about him — yet deemed on a constant basis from some corners as just plain not good enough at the job.
So far, Fields has been able to take the lumps.
“Especially to be a quarterback in this city, you’ve got to have [that],” Poles said. “You’ve got to have toughness, got to have mental toughness, got to be able to block it out.”
How Williams might handle public criticism on Sundays “would be a concern for me,” Browne said. Moore is unconcerned, making the point that “scrutiny is something he’s experienced more than most, if not all, quarterbacks in college.”
Among some skeptics, there was a sense that Williams shut it down somewhat as the losses mounted. Given the weaknesses of his team, that might be entirely unfair. So, too — depending whom you ask — was the blowback Williams received for some little things along the way at USC.
Williams paints his fingernails before every game, and some of the designs are more eye-catching than others. Before the 2022 Pac-12 championship game against Utah, the right-hander painted “F-U-*-*” (without the asterisks) across the nails on his throwing hand and “U-T-A-H” across the nails on the other. The Trojans went into that game 11-1 but got smoked 47-24. As indiscretions go, this was kind of a bad one.
This past season, after the Trojans fell 52-42 to Washington — their third loss in four games — and dropped out of Pac-12 contention, Williams, who’d played a great game, climbed onto a wall separating the field from the stands and bawled into the arms of his mother, Dayna Price, who held a piece of posterboard in front of his helmet to shield him from the television cameras. Still, they lingered on the scene as Williams fell apart, his chest heaving.
What’s wrong with crying? With seeking comfort from a parent? Not a thing. Unless, that is, you’re in league with the sea of jerks who eagerly pounced on social media, ridiculing Williams for it. One of them was former five-time Pro Bowl pass rusher Robert Mathis, who tweeted that Williams was “soft.”
“He ran and jumped in the stands to his mommy and cried,” Mathis wrote. “I always tell players I’ll never lie to ’em, and this is not the look you want from your trigger man.”
Also, there were comments made by USC players during and after a 42-28 Holiday Bowl upset of Louisville, a game Williams opted out of and one several other key teammates skipped.
“We a team now! We a team now!” cornerback Jacobe Covington yelled after a big play that helped ice the game. It was portrayed by some as a shot at Williams — the squad’s seven-figure superstar and media obsession — who was there cheering on his teammates.
After it was over, quarterback Miller Moss, who’d had a monster night in Williams’ shoes, throwing for 372 yards and six touchdowns, said the Trojans had “come together as a team — no ego, no individual.”
Moore, who was on the sideline, said none of it was “specific to Caleb,” but rather was the guys who played, many of them season-long backups, closing ranks as a new team.
“But do I think in the NIL world there are complicated locker rooms? I do,” Moore said. “I can’t speak to if Caleb is the poster boy for that.”
Roth has been involved with the famed Elite 11 camp, an annual gathering of the top 20 or so QB recruits in the country, since 2009. The incoming college stars who’ve stood tallest among their peers since then include Jameis Winston, Tua Tagovailoa, Trevor Lawrence, Bryce Young, C.J. Stroud and — as much as any of them — Fields.
“I remember with Justin and Trevor [in 2017], it was, ‘Whoa, these two guys are different from everybody else,’ ” Roth said.
But Williams was on a higher level than any of them.
“He was the best Elite 11 quarterback I’ve ever had,” Roth said, “and he’s the best college quarterback I’ve ever evaluated.”
There’s a recommendation for you. But what will the Bears do?
They’re on the clock.
