- Days after Williams was outdueled by 2024 draftmate J.J. McCarthy, more questions arise.
- The No. 1 pick of the 2024 draft, five more quarterbacks were picked after Williams in a record-tying first round.
- The Bears are now 5-13 with Williams as their starter.
Trafficking in “generational talent” can be a very tricky and professionally perilous endeavor for NFL teams.
Monday night served a stark reminder, when Caleb Williams and the Chicago Bears collapsed in a 27-24 loss to the Minnesota Vikings, who rode a comeback engineered by second-year quarterback J.J. McCarthy. It didn’t take long in the aftermath for questions to arise as to whether McCarthy, his professional debut delayed by a year after a knee injury in the 2024 preseason wiped out his rookie campaign, might already be a superior quarterback to Williams, the No. 1 pick of the 2024 draft (nine spots ahead of McCarthy).
“He absolutely would (be) – based on one game,” former NFL cornerback and current ESPN analyst Domonique Foxworth said on ‘Get Up’ Tuesday morning.
“It’s such a prisoner of the moment move.”
Fair and fair. Yet pending a quick and dramatic turnaround, it’s a narrative to which Williams may be subject to a lifetime sentence.
He’s essentially been issued one verdict after Jayden Daniels, whom the Washington Commanders selected in the spot after Williams, produced what was almost inarguably the greatest rookie season of all time in 2024, willing a recently wayward franchise all the way to the NFC championship game. Williams, by comparison, had a sometimes-up-but-mostly-down rookie season, the Bears finishing 5-12 and making their first midseason coaching change after more than a century of operations.
Good luck finding anybody who’d take Williams over Daniels now.
But the Bears wasted little time pulling the trigger on Williams a year ago. Could Chicago general manager Ryan Poles have picked Daniels had he even wanted to – politically, professionally or from a public relations standpoint? We may never get an insightful answer. Fourteen years after wrestling with the Peyton Manning-Ryan Leaf debate in 1998, the Indianapolis Colts wasted little time going with Andrew Luck over Robert Griffin III. Former Houston Texans GM Charley Casserly famously chose defensive end Mario Williams No. 1 in 2006 over Heisman Trophy winner Reggie Bush, who was clearly the people’s choice given he was expected to be the next Gale Sayers. (Bush was good but hardly Sayers.)
Assessing generational talents can be tricky undertakings indeed, including Trevor Lawrence, “tank for Tua,” et al. Due diligence remains crucial − John Elway doesn’t come around very often.
But matters could be worsening for Williams, who was widely anointed as a presumptive No. 1 pick years ago, whether that happened when he took command of the Oklahoma Sooners midway through his freshman season in 2021 or when he won the 2022 Heisman for USC. Like Luck or Lawrence before him, it wasn’t really a question as to if Williams would hear his name called to kick off an NFL draft but merely when.
It hasn’t even been 18 months since that outcome actually materialized but whispers are already surfacing that Williams might wind up being the worst of the record-tying (along with the legendary ’83 draft) six quarterbacks taken in the 2024 draft’s first round.
Is the mounting noise reasonable – especially given McCarthy has started all of one NFL game, 17 fewer than Williams? No. Is it an occupational hazard? Most definitely.
“Man, it’s looking pretty rough,” former New York Giants vice president of player personnel Marc Ross told USA TODAY Sports.
“The biggest revelation is the mental part of it for him. It’s really holding him back.”
As Williams tries to adapt to Chicago’s rookie head coach, avowed offensive wunderkind Ben Johnson, he’s also trying to break habits that served him well in college but haven’t in the NFL – namely, holding the ball too long in a bid to make a play, taking too many sacks (a league-worst 68 in 2024) and struggling to make plays out of structure.
“The real issue that I see for Caleb,” said Foxworth, “is that he never seems comfortable, even on his good plays.”
Make no mistake, the Bears undermined Williams organizationally in 2024, failing to give him a seasoned offensive coordinator or an experienced backup to help him navigate the early trials and tribulations of being a professional, among other failings. (Conversely, the Vikings have done the exact opposite, providing McCarthy with a top-tier supporting cast.)
But after a 2025 offseason that seemingly included a strong draft, promising free agent haul and hiring of perhaps the most coveted HC candidate in years, Johnson himself has been obviously frustrated with the trajectory of the offense this summer.
As he did in his preseason debut last month, Williams was a house of fire at Monday’s outset, completing his first 10 passes against Minnesota and capping Chicago’s opening drive with a 9-yard touchdown run, his first in the NFL.
But, similar to the preseason contest against Buffalo in August, it seemed the further Williams got from Johnson’s opening script, the more he struggled. He completed just 11 of his final 25 passes Monday, and the offense didn’t find the end zone again until he hit Rome Odunze for a TD with little more than two minutes to go – a score that was largely cosmetic.
“First drive – scripted. Second drive – still scripted,” said Ross, now an analyst for NFL Network. “Now he’s gotta go play, now he’s gotta do it on his own, now he’s gotta adjust.
“And the Vikings figured it out, and he couldn’t really do anything after that. He doesn’t have the capacity mentally to handle it all and say, ‘OK, I can make adjustments, I can change (based) on what they’re doing to me.’”
And whether it was indecisiveness or inaccuracy, Williams missed tight end Cole Kmet breaking free across the middle at one point and failed to hit wide-open DJ Moore as the wideout was running uncovered toward the pylon with 2:26 to go for a surefire touchdown that would have provided the Bears with more time to potentially win or tie the game with one more defensive stop.
A day after the game, Johnson’s assessment of the offense essentially aligns with Ross’, if (obviously) not as pointed.
“I’m still getting to know the player,” Johnson said of Williams. “I thought he started off really well early in that game, and then it certainly, as the game went, seemed to fizzle a little bit and then towards the end he came to life again. That’s something that we’ll have to work through.”
Chicago’s finish paled in comparison to the one orchestrated by McCarthy, who was brutal for the first three quarters of his debut but led Minnesota to three touchdowns in the final period – two courtesy of McCarthy’s arm and one coming thanks to his legs.
To say McCarthy is definitively better than Williams at this juncture is folly, recency bias at its worst. The same is true of the New England Patriots’ Drake Maye and Atlanta Falcons’ Michael Penix Jr. To be sure, Maye, Penix and McCarthy all have their advocates, each of them flashing estimable potential in relatively brief windows. Meanwhile, Williams’ 18 NFL starts matches that trio’s combined total, all of them still relative unknowns whom defenses haven’t had sufficient time to study and appropriately attack.
“Here’s the thing with quarterbacks, you can only fool people for so long – you can only trick defense so long, you can only out-scheme people and hide before they have to do it,” says Ross.
“That’s independent of a new offensive line, independent of receivers, play calling – they have to it. And the best quarterbacks, the great quarterbacks, are able to control the game and manipulate the game and raise the level of everyone before they get figured out.”
Daniels and Bo Nix, who led the Denver Broncos to a surprise playoff berth in 2024, are unquestionably well ahead of Williams. Right now. Though, in fairness, there are plenty of examples of players like former New York Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez, who (briefly) appeared like he’d be a better pro than Matthew Stafford, the No. 1 overall pick in 2009, four spots ahead of Sanchez. Stafford will go to the Hall of Fame whenever he’s done playing. Sanchez was done a long time ago, now a fixture in broadcast booths.
Still, Sanchez played a huge role in taking the Jets to two AFC championship games. Bears fans can currently only hope Williams achieves such results. And given Johnson and Poles, who recently signed an extension, are both under contract through the 2029 season, pressure is shifting toward Williams to produce at a time when franchises are increasingly willing to cut bait on first-round quarterbacks – even top-five picks.
The Bears next face the wounded Lions in Detroit. McCarthy and Penix, meanwhile, will square off in the Sunday night spotlight.
To his credit, Williams remains publicly unbowed.
“I think it’s a growing process,” he said Monday.
“It’s going to keep growing from here. The start, this is the start, but definitely not the end.”
But given how grace periods for young players have all but dried up, it could be coming much more quickly than anyone would have once thought.