How to Defuse a Chicago Football Bomb by Caleb Williams: “I Love Being Here’

Bears Star Looks Beyond "QB Gate" to Team's Playoff Mission at OTAs

By Clete Campbell

Windy City End Zone

Caleb Williams has never worked with the Chicago Police Department’s bomb squad, has never served with the U.S. Army’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal Unit or even made a cameo in a James Bond picture.

But the Bears quarterback is already a certified expert in defusing explosives. You can’t survive a season — yet alone a career — as a Bears signal caller without knowing which wires to cut and what tripwires to avoid.

Williams went with the red wire Wednesday and sought to to avoid a second blast from the dynamite-packed controversy that detonated earlier his month when his team’s (and father’s) disparaging views of the Bears before the team chose the USC Heisman Trophy winner as the top overall pick in the 2024 surfaced.

“Chicago is the place quarterbacks go to die,” Carl Williams told author Seth Wickersham in “American Kings: A Biography of a Quarterback,” which hits bookshelves in September.

There’s no arguing the gospel truth of Carl’s viewpoint, but the optics were as bad as the inside view from a downtown parking garage.

Will Caleb Williams suffer the same fate as the fallen never-were-stars before him? That’s the ultimate question that will determine whether this latest Bears coaching reboot works or not.

“How about this list going back to 1971?” asked Fox 32 Chicago columnist Rick Telander, a famed Chicago sportswriter who suffered vision loss watching the unfortunate likes of “Bobby Douglass, Gary Huff, Bob Avellini, Vince Evans, Mike Tomczak, Steve Walsh, Dave Krieg, Shane Matthews, Cade McNown, Jim Miller, Craig Krenzel, Kyle Orton, Rex Grossman. “If those quarterbacks didn’t figuratively die in Chicago, they assuredly were wounded.

“Jay Cutler? Damaged into retirement. Mitchell Trubisky? Justin Fields? Almost nothing.”

William, unfazed by the decades-long futility that proceeded him in the Bears huddle, sought to put the inflamed issue to bed during Day 5 of Bears’ Organized Team Activities (OTAs) in Lake Forest.

He said he doesn’t see himself as a prisoner being held captive by a team that has yet to produce a 4,000-yard passer in its 105-year history and has produced only two single-selection Pro Bowl quarterbacks since 1963 (Jim McMahon in 1985 and injury alternate Mitch Trubisky in 2018).

“I wanted to be here,” said Williams while not denying his family’s comments. “I love being here.”

Williams admitted the storm he and his father’s comments of the Bears and the city stirred up has been a giant distraction. He is refocusing on the mission that is his purpose for being QB1 for the Chicago Bears: taking this once-proud franchise back to the Super Bowl.

“The main objective of being here is to turn [this] around," he said. “…That's what we're here to do. That's what they brought me here to do."

As the Bears get to field work on reversing their awful fortunes, they are owning up to their past failures and going all in on new head coach Ben Johnson’s blueprint to reverse them.

“Just to be honest, this organization over the last 10 years or whatever, it’s been a losing culture,” Bears safety and defensive captain Kevin Byard told reporters.

“We haven’t really won a lot, so you have to drastically come in and try to rearrange everything.”

New defensive coordinator Dennis Allen’s unit is trying to reignite the Bears’ once-vaulted defense, which slipped to 27th in yards allowed per game and 28th in scoring in 2024 during Chicago’s lousy 5-12 season.

The Bears buoyed the interior of their defense with offseason shopping and drafting that brought NFL veteran tackle Grady Jarrett, end Dayo and Texas A&M tackle Shemar Turner into the mix.

Allen is determined to build an aggressive Chicago D with “swagger.”

“The main thing we’re trying to get accomplished is really shifting the culture, changing the culture and not trying to do what we’ve done in the past,” Byard said.

Bears quarterback Caleb Williams says he is all in on being the Bears' franchise quarterback.

And that starts with the Bears’ QB1 burying the ghosts of the failed quarterbacks before him.