By all accounts, everybody loves Caleb Williams. He's The Future; he's What Justin Fields Was Supposed To Be, he's Ridiculously Special; he's even Next-Gen Patrick Mahomes. He's also hypersensitive about bad reviews, which makes him every other quarterback ever.
But there's one thing neither he nor any of his growing army of acolytes factor into their reviews. He's a Chicago Bear, and the Bears are one of those teams governed by divine law, and the law in question here is this: The Bears don't get to have quarterbacks because the gods—whether your particular deity is a he, she, it, or they—say they don't get to have quarterbacks. If that's what sticks in Williams's epiglottis, well, tough darts, lad. Sometimes the spiritual world just has better cards.
We don't need to go through the dozens of quarterbacks who have started a game for the Bears since the retirement of their only Hall of Fame signal-caller, Sid Luckman. That was after the 1950 season, so we are closing in on three-quarters of a century without the Bears having a great quarterback, and only one, Jim McMahon, who still puts a smile on the faces of their fans. That's not just bad luck, that's a sign from the galactic pixies that you have done something genuinely horrifying that requires generations of shame-caked penance. In this case, it is four generations and running.
The National Football League has worked very hard to level its membership, from the common draft to the rulebook tweaks to constant expansions, and yet the Bears and their quarterback vacancy are among the very few remaining constants. Their quarterback history is like the list of medieval popes—if they didn't get Jesus to show up at a nobleman's stag party within six months, they got a curative arrow through the eye and three new popes sprung up as replacements, including the odd horse. They are among the oldest franchises in the sport, and yet the team closest to them geographically and historically, the Green Bay Packers, have used barely half as many. There's a message in that.
So we get it. The ethereal guides have singled out the Bears and their quarterback for generational scorn, which is why the love affair for Caleb Williams after two practice games seems so outsized. His pure talent is clear, and this is not us trying to muscle our way onto his Bulletin Board Of Bastards. He can throw, he can run, he can electrify an audience—but he is still a Bear, and unless we are prepared to say he can cheat not only physics but metaphysics as well, we are betting on the Bears being the Bears.
Remember, this is a version of the same instant love affair the fan base had for Justin Fields, and look how that turned out—after three years, he was shipped out and is currently being forced to watch Russell Wilson end his career in Pittsburgh. Bears fans have wanted this quarterback thing to work out so badly that they rooted for Mitchell Trubisky to not be Mitchell Trubisky, and tolerated Smirkin' Jay Cutler for nearly a decade. They are convinced that the gods owe them one because the gods are supposed to play fair, and for them the interest on that debt only grows with every passing seven-win season. And yet the response from the home office is always the same: Nope, not this one either.
So the question that must be asked, as long as we're conclusion-jumping in an Olympic year, is this: Is Caleb Williams good enough to defy the will of the mighties? Is this what we're all saying? This is the one who spits in the eye of the universe's most well-connected? This may seem like betting the heavy favorite, but we're betting on history because it's a living history. If Caleb Williams wants to put something on his motivation list, let him put the Bears logo right at the top, for that is the most imposing doubter of them all.
