House of Dysfunction, Part I: The Curious Case of Caleb Williams
Our series on the Chicago Bears begins with a look at the quarterback. His coaches from 2024 open up on a season from hell. ("There’s no substitute for the work. That’s something he needs to learn.")
Highlight reels failed to capture his signature move as a professional quarterback. Cameras weren’t flashing and sycophants weren’t hyperventilating. But, yes, Caleb Williams was able to master one signature move as a rookie last season.
In college, he’d juke and spin and escape helpless defenders with hypnotic flair. He was an artist coloring outside the lines and this 53 1/3-yard wide, 120-yard long field was his personal canvas. But in the pros, such sorcery was scarce. In the pros, he’s been escaping a different setting with remarkable precision and consistency.
The most dramatic spectacle of them all occurred on Dec. 26. His team was hosting the Seattle Seahawks on Thursday Night Football. Commercials rolled during a timeout, so nobody at home saw this poignant moment that perfectly summarized the 2024 Chicago Bears. In the wake of two firings, heartbreaking defeats, staggering to the finish line of an agonizing 5-12 season, interim head coach Thomas Brown tried to explain something to his starting quarterback and… no. Williams was not having it.
An auto-response kicked in.
As he had done many times to many coaches all season, Williams turned his head and walked away. Shane Waldron, before getting fired as offensive coordinator, used to stay quiet. Not Brown. Not a stern, blunt, old-school coach who believed this 22-year-old crossed a line of disrespect. The typically calm coach lost it. On the headset, another Bears assistant coach recalls Brown pressing the mic to finish his conversation: “Get your ass back here right now! Don’t fucking walk away when I’m talking to you!”
Unfazed, Williams sashayed away. Right back to the huddle.
The Bears lost, 6-3.
“That’s when you knew the world was coming to an end,” one coach says.
He pauses. He thinks back. The world might’ve ended that day, but in truth? All warning signs were obvious seven months prior. Outside the walls of Halas Hall, hype reigned. Tickets sold in record numbers when the Bears made Williams the No. 1 overall pick. No. 18 jerseys flew off the shelves. This glitzy gazelle was universally extolled as the charismatic, electric, dare we say Mahomesian playmaker these Bears have lacked since inception in 1919. OTAs arrived, coaches unwrapped this gift from the football gods who’ve cursed this organization for so long and… yikes.
Williams struggled to execute elementary tasks. Every day was a new disaster.
That early, that spring, the Bears changed the snap count to appease Williams. Instead of using a combination of colors and numbers like every other team in the NFL, the Bears reverted to a “Ready, set, go!” straight out of JV football because that’s what the quarterback requested. Aside from the obvious on-field consequences — defenders could tee off — the Bears were establishing a troubling precedent in allowing a rookie to tell them exactly what to do. Veterans couldn’t believe it. “Are you shitting me?” one receiver asked a coach.
When a play call was sent in, he’d stare at this wristband for a painful length of time. “Like it was in another language,” another coach says. Williams verbalized the call in the huddle, it was wrong half the time, and then players would be lined up wrong all over the field. Verbiage was truncated. Huddling was minimized. The playbook, dumbed down. The Bears offense devolved into an exercise of trial and error to fit whatever the USC rookie demanded.
All of which would’ve been manageable if Williams was willing to work. He was not.
For all the talk about wanting to be great, this new quarterback didn’t seem to have the desire. When he wasn’t storming away from a coach, he was telling veteran wide receivers how to run their routes before taking a game rep himself. In the meeting room, he barely said a word and didn’t pay attention. Coaches often caught Williams on the wrong page of the gameplan completely. He blew off film sessions and lifts.
Chicago made him a captain.
Games began.
Chaos reigned.
The 2025 NFL season is here and these Chicago Bears are the most mesmerizing team of them all. Hope’s been restored with the union of a captivating quarterback (Williams) and a brilliant offensive mind (Ben Johnson). In free agency, the Bears rebuilt their offensive line. In the draft, they added weaponry. All offseason, it’s been drilled into your cranium that a bunch of dolts stunted the quarterback’s growth last season. Poor coaching ruining young quarterbacks is a tale old as time. Williams, so the prevailing storyline goes, is finally free. Thus, it’s now time for Chicago to rocket-launch into NFL contention.
When Go Long started phoning sources, this was honestly the direction I expected to trek. We’ve chronicled skeletons past in Chicago and explored the new duo. Yet, if we’ve learned anything since launching our longform site in 2020, it’s that there’s always a shady underbelly to the NFL that too often goes ignored. Life was, indeed, miserable in Chicago last season. But not for the reasons you think.
Williams was more source of turmoil, than victim.
And as always, the stench runs deeper than one person. The Chicago Bears possessed the most treasured asset in all of pro sports — the No. 1 overall pick in a QB-rich NFL Draft — yet proved again to be their own worst enemy.
For this three-part series, Go Long chatted with 32 sources. Coaches, scouts, execs, players and staffers inside Halas Hall guide readers through the sludge. Many have landed new jobs. To share their experiences without fear of retribution they’re granted a condition of anonymity.
The more we dig, the more it’s clear why the Bears have one winning season since 2012.
In Part I, we reveal how 2024 spiraled out of control through the eyes of those coaches. A season that included extreme frustrations, a near benching, a late-season revelation and mass firings. “A shitshow,” one says.
In Part II, we revisit the farce of a draft process that led GM Ryan Poles to select Williams No. 1 overall. One personnel man recalls the charade as “rigged.”
In Part III, we zoom out: Who’s to blame? The Bears have become an organization repellent to independent thought. The GM inherited a bad situation and managed to make it worse with a 15-36 record. All roads in this league tend to lead back to ownership.
Ben Johnson and his staff now stare down the barrel of more disorder than they anticipated.
The quarterback he inherits is not the same species of football junkie.
Former Bears coaches cannot grin and bear it.