The news that’s emerged about Caleb Williams and how he wanted to circumvent the draft process or, more specifically, prevent the Chicago Bears from selecting him (the team that has buried the careers of numerous quarterbacks) is of course interesting.
That part of this recent Williams story isn’t the most interesting part.
I’ll tell you what is.
In the ESPN story that originates from Seth Wickersham’s upcoming work, ‘American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback,’ is this stunning piece of information about Williams and the Bears’ coaching staff: “At times, Williams said he would watch film alone, with no instruction or guidance from the coaches. ‘No one tells me what to watch,’ Caleb Williams told his dad. ‘I just turn it on.’”
Wut?
I suspect in the coming days Williams will attempt to clean this quote up, lessen its impact, portray it differently. That’s because there are so many damning aspects to this remark it’s difficult to find a place to start.
We need to break this down like forensic scientists and try to understand exactly what Williams is saying. First, what did Williams mean exactly by ‘no one tells me what to watch?’ Did the way he watched film at USC not translate to the NFL?
Or did Williams mean he needed the Bears’ coaching staff to explain how they watched film? Or that he needed help with what to look for in the NFL?
Either way, it cannot be overstated how much of an indictment this is of the Bears and last season’s since-fired coaching staff. More on that in a moment.
It’s been noted that Williams himself isn’t quoted on this. His father is. A number of former NFL players didn’t seem to care either way. Some of them obliterated Williams for not being more aggressive in learning how to watch film on his own.
Former Packers wide receiver James Jones, a Bears critic (because, well, he’s a Packer), blasted Williams.
‘I don’t know Caleb Williams personally, man, you know what I mean? And I don’t want to call (anyone) a liar, but I played a long time in the National Football League,’ Jones said. ‘…There is time in a day to where we watched film as an offense, to where we watch film as a position group.
‘So you’re not going to sit up here and tell me that you (didn’t watch) film with your quarterbacks or you didn’t watch film with your offense because you do. They put that in the schedule.’
But it seems the issue was Williams’ uncertainty when watching film alone as opposed to in position groups.
Former Bengals quarterback Boomer Esiason, the crankiest old man in any room, went a step further and called Williams entitled.
‘When you think about this, I think a lot of these kids and their parents are nowadays and that the level of entitlement is breathtaking,’ Esiason said. ‘It’s no wonder why he failed initially and it’s no wonder why the coach got fired. So now they go out and get an offensive coach in Ben Johnson and you know what? Now it’s on (him). It’s going to be on (him) to live up to these so-called lofty expectations that he has for himself and that his father has for his son.’
(You can almost hear Esiason’s old man ramblings careening off clouds.)
It’s true that on rare occasions we’ll hear about players who don’t individually study film. Super Bowl champion Rob Gronkowski, an infamous lunkhead, once admitted he didn’t watch film, and instead got human cheat sheet Tom Brady to summarize the key plot points for him like Brady was ChatGPT.
‘I don’t watch film,’ Gronkowski told the Manning brothers in 2021 on their ‘Monday Night Football’ alternate broadcast. ‘I do go up to Tom, because I know Tom watches like, I don’t know, 40 hours of film a week.’
‘My teammate (Cameron Brate) just asked me the other day, ‘Rob, I have a serious question: Do you ever watch film?’ And I said, ‘No, I don’t. I just run by guys, if I’m feeling good, I’m feeling good,” Gronkowski recalled. ‘So I don’t watch film. I do watch film when the team is showing it.’
‘(I’ll ask), ‘Tom, who is covering me, and what type of coverages are they doing?’ I go, ‘That’s why I love playing with you Tom, you know everything,” Gronkowski said.
(All of that is so Gronk.)
Wickersham told the story to Fox 32 in Chicago that when veteran quarterback Alex Smith, the former No. 1 overall pick, came into the league he also wasn’t told what to look for when watching film and did so alone. When Smith later went to Kansas City, he helped teach Patrick Mahomes how to watch film as a pro.
Arizona Wildcats wide receiver Tetairoa McMillan said before the 2025 draft he didn’t do individual film study when in college.
‘I don’t like watching film either,’ McMillan said. ‘I don’t ever need to watch it by myself because we go over it as a receiver group.’
So, yes, not every player watches film, but it remains extremely rare for quarterbacks in football today to be left on his own to do it. It simply does not happen with any sort of regularity.
Maybe this is an indictment of Williams but I don’t think so. This is more about the Bears. This is a massive, gigantic, almost incomprehensible failure of the franchise.
How does the staff, namely former head coach Matt Eberflus, and former offensive coordinator Shane Waldron, not notice this issue? Or did they know and ignore it? There are so many questions here.
What’s not in question is the Bears again proving their quarterback dysfunction. This is such a good example of why. It’s almost comical. You can’t imagine some of the great franchises in the league doing this today. Teams take so much care in how they treat quarterbacks. Educate them. Protect them. They are the NFL’s equivalent of the rarest of diamonds.
There seems to be so much more to this story. There’s a lot we don’t know, but from what we do, this is quarterback malpractice.
It’s true that this offseason the Bears have done a great deal to try to help Williams. They got a new offensive-minded head coach in Ben Johnson, more offensive line help and weapons. Maybe that all works and the Chicago QB Dysfunction Era will end. But what this story shows is that the dysfunction in the Bears organization when it comes to quarterbacks dies hard.
What quarterbacks look for in film study (or are supposed to) are all the trickeries and tells in defenses. Not to mention what they learn about their own offense (and themselves) from watching practice film. Yes, coaches can relay a lot of that, but it’s better if you can digest it on your own. Brady wasn’t born with the ability to decode a defense. He learned so much of that from study. All of the great ones do. There’s no film gene.
Brady has spoken about how Bill Belichick taught him how to break down film. Brady would expand on Belichick’s instruction and become one of the great film studiers of all time. It got to the point where Brady knew some defenses better than they knew themselves.
“I asked Tom once, ‘Is that film study why you are so confident out there?’” Damon Huard, Brady’s backup from 2001-2003, once explained. “He said, ‘Yeah, it’s awesome.’”
Williams was apparently in the film room. Just alone. Which is extremely Bears-ian.