Caleb Williams is carrying an unimaginable burden, and it's not just the matter of being the last living quarterback in the NFL, or easing into his place as the best Chicago Bears quarterback in three quarters of a century while running the most prolific Bears offense in 50 years. It's been only eight weeks since his season began, and already he is the preeminent face of Chicago sports. This looks like high praise, but while that praise would be deserved where Williams is concerned, consider the context.
Williams is not working against a deep field—not in the NFC North, which is the toughest division in the league, but in the town in which he works. There, his opposition is Northwestern's football team, which is 6-2 but unranked and unlikely to break through the upper crust of the Big Ten. The Cubs were routed from the postseason in the shortest possible amount of time, and the White Sox are still striking out despite their season having ended four weeks ago. The Sky are notable only for having turned Angel Reese into a useful player by trading her to another team. And the Bulls and Blackhawks are demonstrably god-awful, well within the margin for error for having a spectacular margin for errors. You know, like the post-election Republican mood.
How god-awful, you ask, since you've been averting your eyes? The Bulls are 1-7, and are losing their games by an average of 18 points per game, which ranks as the largest margin of stinkage in NBA history, albeit in this admittedly minuscule sample; they are allowing the second-highest number of points per game ever. They will doubtless revert to a gentler if still depressing mean, as all non-expansion teams tend to do, but with a starting lineup of Caleb Wilson, Norman Powell, Josh Giddey, Matas Buzelis, and Jalen Smith, it would be foolish to rule out the 11-71 outcome for their season.
And how god-awful is the NHL team, you ask, since you also haven't been paying attention here? The Blackhawks are the second-worst team in the league on merit, and the only reason they aren't worse is that, in an affront to all that is holy and also their large and deservedly dispirited fan base, the Vancouver Canucks also exist. The Blackhawks score less than any team that isn't the Canucks, shoot less than any team that isn't the Canucks, give up more goals than any team other than the Canucks, and in all are wasting Connor Bedard's career on the altar of general awfulness they started establishing after winning their last Stanley Cup in 2015. That Bedard has not yet dropped tools and demanded a trade—the famous Hellebuyck-Larkin gambit, now sweeping the sport—is probably the best thing they have to say for themselves. In all, the Hawks look very 14-61-9 from here, and that's giving them all the best of it.
Williams looks good relative to all that, but his appeal is in many ways a tribute to branding. He is a more efficient but not quite spectacular thrower of the football, and a highly mobile but not quite run-happy quarterback (Josh Allen is the game-breaking fullback the game never thought it had, as a point of comparison). The Bears' renaissance as an offensive team could be better credited to head coach Ben Johnson—it's a potato/po-tah-to scenario, mostly—and it would be cheap to forget running back D'Andre Swift, who leads the league with 10 touchdowns, not to mention a prototypically stout-ish Bears defense. None of what the Bears do is mathematically elite, but it is all working, and working especially well when compared to the other entertainments in the Greater Chicagoland era.
This is probably more a referendum on how genuinely rancid the Hawks and Bulls are than an acknowledgement that the Bears have joined the late 20th century, if not the actual second quartile of the 21st. Nevertheless, a rose in a garbage dump always looks better if only because the surrounding landscape is so bleak. Look, the New York Giants are 4-2-1, and they're always awful; even if the league is down aesthetically, that's hardly Williams' fault. Hell, the Bears even navigated their Week 8 appearance on the Buck-Aikman Middle-Finger-Palooza without a mark, so this could certainly be their year as well as anyone else.
For the moment, they have Chicago, and Chicago has them. That doesn't even include the fact that the Bears are considering a new stadium site in Arlington Heights rather than Hammond, Indiana. That's still not downtown, and it still requires swindling the Arlingtonians out of hundreds of millions, but everything is baby steps. If Caleb Williams represents even a small piece of the end of our long national nightmare and Chicago's regional one, well, it doesn't have be totally accurate, as long as it gets you through the traffic. It just has to be less of what was there before.
