Is Caleb Williams All-In on the Bears? A Chat With ESPN's Seth Wickersham
The bestselling author who broke the Caleb-Williams-didn't-want-to-play-in-Chicago story discusses his upcoming book, "American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback."
JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT the Chicago Bears’ quarterback situation was normal, well, it not.
Last week, we learned from bestselling author Seth Wickersham that during the latter part of 2023 and early 2024, Heisman Trophy winner and USC quarterback Caleb Williams and his father Carl were working behind the scenes to create a scenario in which Willams wouldn’t be selected by the Chicago Bears with the top pick in the 2024 NFL Draft.
Wickersham also revealed that after Williams was, indeed, drafted by the Bears, the then-rookie wasn’t given anything close to proper guidance from his coaching staff, the biggest culprit being former Chicago offensive coordinator Shane Waldron.
We’ll find out the full details of the Williams/Bears kerfuffle on September 9, 2025, when Wickersham’s book, American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback, hits stores. Until then, we’ll just have to make do with a few words from the man himself.
Alan Goldsher: Take us down the Williams Family Pre-Draft Rabbit Hole.
Seth Wickersham: Carl Williams, Caleb's dad, had spent the better part of a year trying to work around the NFL's draft structure. He had met with agents, other sports insiders, and labor lawyers, just trying to figure out if there was a way to give his son some agency over his future employer. He told me in the lead up to the draft that Chicago is where quarterbacks go to die.
Carl also had a lot of issues with the entire draft process. He knows as well as anyone that organizational infrastructure is a huge determinant in quarterback success. The list of [quarterbacks] who have been affected by being drafted by traditionally bad teams is really long, and he wanted to find a way around it, even if most of the methods he considered really weren't feasible.
At the end of the day, the question facing Caleb and Carl Williams was the same question facing Archie and Eli Manning, or the same question facing Jack and John Elway: Are you willing to make a situation with the team that's going to draft you untenable with the organization and with the city? The Elways were willing to do it, while the Mannings kind of did it in 2004.
Caleb wasn't quite ready to do that—and as a matter of fact, after he met with the Bears in April, despite some of his previous reservations, he was pretty excited about being a Bear. And he told his dad, I think I can do it here.
A.G.: Do you feel like Carl wanted to be a Curt Flood and repair an issue for generations to come? Or was this all about Caleb?
S.W.: I never asked [Carl] if he sort of saw himself as a trailblazer. I think he was consumed with the task at hand and he just had philosophical problems with the NFL's collective bargaining agreement—at one point, he told me he thought it was unconstitutional. The problem [for him] is that it's collectively bargained, so there really wasn't a way around it.
A.G.: Was there a point that it looked realistic Caleb might sign with another league, or even potentially not play at all?
S.W.: Let's take a step back. One of the things I write about in the book is the concept of the quarterback dad—and in a lot of cases, the quarterback mom, too. The quarterback has become so valuable and so celebrated—and, in some ways, so mysterious—that they need people who are looking out for them because it [can be] a dangerous road.
There are so many landmines that they have to sidestep. There are so many people trying to make money off of them and there are a lot of people who they think they can trust, but they really can't. So you need people who try to understand the system, like Carl Williams because he had his son's back.
There isn’t a how-to guide, so everyone, including Carl Williams, has to learn it as they go. By the time he reached the point where his son was going to be the first pick in the draft—and so much depends on the team that picks him and their infrastructure—he wanted to try and assert a measure of control.
And not for nothing, but just about every one of Caleb’s and Carl’s fears about the Bears ended up coming true in that first season.
A.G.: You’re referring, of course, to Shane Waldron. What was it about Waldron that had the Williamses so concerned?
S.W.: I think it was more in comparison to other offensive minds around the league. Shane Waldron has a terrific resume, he's worked with some really great coaches, and he’s really bright guy with a great educational background. But he was essentially taking a playbook he had learned elsewhere and trying to apply it in Chicago.
Whereas when Caleb met with Kevin O’Connell, the head coach of the Vikings, he saw someone who had been a four-year quarterback starter in college, and briefly teammate of Tom Brady's in the NFL, had learned from some of the brightest coaches and brightest offensive minds in the league, had won a Super Bowl, and was turning out to be a pretty good coach in Minnesota.
Rather than have the guy who's bringing a playbook from his previous place and trying to apply it, you want a guy who’s the brains behind that particular playbook. And I think Kevin O’Connell could speak quarterback in a way that was unlike anybody on the Bears’ staff.
A.G.: That sort of approach—fitting a quarterback into a playbook rather than building a playbook around a quarterback—has been a consistent problem in Chicago since the Jim McMahon era.
S.W.: That approach never works [with a young QB]. The rookie year for a quarterback is about survival. Not everybody has a year like Dan Marino in 1983 or Jaden Daniels last year. Most of them are just out there trying to survive. You take the scars you that you got [in your first season] and you try to apply [the lessons] to the next year and the subsequent seasons.
There are a couple of positives you can take from Caleb’s rookie season: Number one, he's proven to be an accountable leader. I think there were some questions when he was coming out of USC. After one loss, he cried in his mother's arms, then he didn't meet with the press after the game. There are a lot of NFL people with whom that wouldn’t fly, both in the locker room and in the front office.
Caleb was put in some very compromised positions last year, and each time, he stood up and answered the questions. He was an accountable leader, and he never broke.
Number two, I think that in known passing situations—which are some of the hardest situations you can be in the NFL—he showed the ability to make big completions and throw passes in pretty impossible spots. So there's a lot to build on.
A.G.: You reported that Williams was not given much in the way of guidance from his offensive coaching staff, and it sounds like the biggest black mark was the fact that he wasn’t properly taught how to watch film. Two questions from that: One, is that as absurd as it sounds? And two, what was it that he would have needed from a coach to watch film properly?
S.W.: I think they actually both have the same answer, and that's that he wanted to be coached hard. I think a lot of people wondered about that when he came out of USC: Is he really about being a quarterback with a capital Q? And I think that he wanted. He was hungrier for more data and more information than, at times, the coaching staff was able to provide, and that's where that frustration came from.
Stuff like this happens more around the NFL than you think; bad teams [are] bad teams for a reason. Just look at Alex Smith.
Smith was drafted by the 49ers first overall, and he [became] the face of the franchise. He told me would sit in a film room by himself and watch film, and he had no guidance, no idea what he was supposed to be looking at. It was later his career that he learned when you have coaches who put those pieces in place, how much it helps, and how much it could help a young quarterback.
Fast forward to when he was with the Kansas City Chiefs and they drafted this guy named Patrick Mahomes. [Smith] took it upon himself to get Patrick ready, and one of those things was teaching him how to watch film: What days you watch certain situations, what are the keys you look for, how you look outside in and inside out. That kind of help was lacking last year in Chicago.
Even though we think of NFL teams as being these conglomerates—almost like individual Fortune 500 franchises—a lot of them can feel kind of like mom and pop situations. And even though you draft a quarterback number one—and even though everyone's jobs are riding on that quarterback’s success—there often isn't the infrastructure in place that the quarterback needs to surround it.
I was with a longtime team president a couple years ago, and he mentioned that he called NFL teams billion dollar lemonade stands, and unfortunately, that [can be] very true. I. I had a good laugh out of that…and I also thanked the guy for a future book title.
A.G.: The Bears have seen a culture change with the arrival of head coach Ben Johnson and a whole new staff. Do you see Caleb thriving this year, or is it going to be another season of learning on the job?
S.W.: I think both. He's still a young quarterback and teams are going to be studying him all offseason, and he has to figure out a way—along with his coaches—to stay ahead of those defenses.
I think the good thing is that [the Bears] have what they originally wanted a year ago, which is an innovative offensive mind who's fully invested in Caleb's success.
Even before Ben Johnson was the, quote, unquote, “hot name” around the NFL, I heard from really good coaches and really good offensive minds in the league that they were not only studying him, but stealing from him.
Johnson clearly sees something in Caleb, and I think that the thing that I would be really optimistic about as a Bears fan: Everyone's fates are tied. Caleb's success is tied to the head coach's success, and the GM’s {Ryan Poles’] success. Everyone's in the same boat, and I think those are the circumstances and situations that usually end up best.
A.G.: Finally, you literally wrote the book on the New England Patriots, so I have to ask if you have any thoughts on Bill Belichick’s child almost-bride.
S.W.: [Laughs] I’m not going there. But thanks for asking.
Seth Wickersham is a senior writer at ESPN whose primary focus is long form enterprise and investigative work on the National Football League. His stories have appeared across ESPN platforms, including the Emmy-award winning programs E60 and Outside the Lines.