How to Survive 'Where Quarterbacks Go to Die'

Caleb Williams refused to run his father's QB Option to avoid being drafted by the Bears.

By Clete Campbell Windy City End Zone Staff Writer

It’s the elephant in the Chicago Bears quarterback room. The angry 800-pound gorilla that has shadowed this proud NFL franchise for decades spanning two centuries.

The unfortunate gospel truth that the Bears can’t avoid and Caleb Williams and his family tried feverishly to escape in the days prior to the 2024 NFL Draft.

"Chicago is the place quarterbacks go to die," Carl Williams, Caleb's father, told Seth Wickersham, author of upcoming "American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback,” an examination of the recruitment and development of football’s next great would-be football prodigies that doubles as a scathing indictment of the Bears’ inexcusable inability to draft and develop franchise quarterbacks.

The book, which you can safely bet your house will not be pre-ordered by Matt Eberflus or the McCaskey family, hits bookstores in September.

The Williams boys tried to avoid the Bears like the plague ahead of Caleb’s eventual drafting as the Bears’ latest franchise QB project. From their 20/20 vantage point watching Mitch Trubisky and Justin Fields – the Bears’ latest failed franchise QB draft projects – crash and burn worse than Aaron Rodgers in New York, they saw Caleb’s NFL career going the way of Ryan Leaf and him losing hundreds of millions of dollars in market-value income.

Team Caleb considered everything, from lawsuit lawyers challenging the NFL’s rookie QB pay scale and Draft process, Caleb playing in the United Football League, to trying to pull a John Elway and Peyton Manning-eque draft hijack trade to the Vikings.

Carl Williams was more blunt than Snoop Dogg circa 1993: “I don’t want my son playing for the Bears,” he told NFL agents ahead of the Draft.

Caleb was in no rush to don the Chicago navy blue either: "I need to go to the Vikings," he told his father.

Wickersham reports Carl Williams’ master plan for his son to avoid the Bears was going nuclear scorched earth on the city of Chicago and the Bears, a QB option Caleb refused to run.

Eventually, as we know, Caleb manned up, embraced Chicago and turned in the greatest statistical rookie QB season in franchise history. “The Chef” improbably started all 17 Bears games despite being sacked a league-leading 68 times. He completed 62.5% of his attempts in the glaring spotlight of being the Bears’ next “Chosen QB,” charting 20 touchdown passes against just six interceptions.

To the Bears’ credit, they have tried to cure their QB cancer by firing Eberflus, hiring offensive guru Ben Johnson as their new head coach, and giving Williams more weapons than Fort Benning, including drafting tight end Colston Loveland and wide receiver Luther Burden III in the first two rounds of this year’s Draft.

"Being able to be in this position, being able to have a first year the way I did, ups and downs, and then to be able come in here, be as confident as I was last year or possibly even more and to be able to get here with the group that we have, I really can't wait to get to work with these guys," Williams said in April.

But Caleb is dealing with the immediate fallout of the book’s leaking. Former Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Boomer Esiason hit him with the dreaded “entitled” tag, speaking a lot of truth in his reasoning.

"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."

Can we blame Caleb’s hesitations about coming to Chicago?

“Maybe this is an indictment of Williams, but I don't think so,” controversial USA Today sports columnist Mike Freeman wrote. (https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/columnist/mike-freeman/2025/05/18/chicago-bears-caleb-williams-film-study/83669775007/) “This is more about the Bears. This is a massive, gigantic, almost incomprehensible failure of the franchise. “This is more about the Bears. This is a massive, gigantic, almost incomprehensible failure of the franchise.”

The Bears’ awful QB past is the past and has to be left in the past (even though it still haunts all of our nightmares). Williams must move forward, grow up and focus on who he wants to be.

A Super Bowl champion.

To do that, he must embrace Chicago like never before and embrace Ben Johnson’s new plan for finally putting a roar in the Bears’ passing game.

Or else, Freeman will be right. Let’s not let that happen.

“It's true that this offseason the Bears have done a great deal to try to help Williams,” Mike wrote. “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.”

Caleb Williams already believes he can. He believed it before he got here.

“I can do it for this team,” he told his dad ahead of becoming the Man in Chicago. “I'm going to go to the Bears.”