‘I wanted to come here’: Bears QB Caleb Williams responds to book details
Chicago Bears quarterback Caleb Williams stepped up to the lectern at Halas Hall and delivered an opening statement that lasted nearly four minutes Wednesday.
He then took questions and, like he often has since being drafted, was unfazed in an uncomfortable spotlight.
Williams was responding to information detailed earlier this month by ESPN’s Seth Wickersham in a new book about quarterbacks. “Chicago is the place quarterbacks go to die,” Williams’ father, Carl, said in the book, which is set to be published in September.
“This whole storm that happened, it wasn’t something that we wanted to happen at this point,” Williams said. “We’re focused on the present, we’re focused on the now.”
He said the excerpt from Wickersham’s book has “been a distraction,” so he wanted to address it Wednesday.
Williams acknowledged, among other things, that he had a good predraft meeting with the Minnesota Vikings last year and that he and his family discussed “ideas” about avoiding starting his NFL career in Chicago.
But he said things changed after meeting with the Bears.
“After I came on my visit here, it was a … deliberate and determined answer that I wanted to come here,” Williams said. “I wanted to be here. I love being here.”
Williams said he wanted the “challenge” of turning the Bears around and quarterbacking a team that has never had a 4,000-yard passer, echoing his new head coach, Ben Johnson.
“I wanted to come here and be the guy and be a part and be a reason why the Chicago Bears turn this thing around,” he said. “That last thing that was said in all of that I think is the most important thing is that I wanted to be here.”
With Williams being the clear-cut top pick coming out of USC, and the Bears owning the No. 1 pick, Carl told several agents in 2024 he didn’t want his son to play for the Bears, according to Wickersham’s book.
Williams said his dad is a smart man and he loves him, but he doesn’t speak for him.
“I shut him down quite a bit,” Williams said with a smile. “He has ideas and he’s a smart man and so I listen. I always listen. I’m very fortunate to be in this position in the sense of playing quarterback, but also very fortunate to have a very strong-minded father. We talk very often, my mom and my dad are my best friends, so being able to have conversations with them to understand that everything they say is also portrayed on me.”
A notable highlight that ESPN shared from Wickersham’s book was Williams telling his father that he received little instruction for watching film during his rookie season.
“That was a funny one that came out,” Caleb Williams said Wednesday. “It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to watch film. It was more or less the sense of …. learning ways to watch film and be more efficient, learning ways to pick up things better. So that was a funny one that came out, that in context, in how that was trying to be portrayed, didn’t get portrayed that way.”
Williams said he isn’t curious about what else the chapter includes.
“Nah, honestly don’t care,” he said. “Like I said, all of those things are in the past. All of those things happened already. We are here focused on the future, we are here focused on the present and really trying to get this train going, picking up steam and choo chooing along.”
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