Caleb Williams does Chicago tour, no word on Bears stadium and White Sox deal Luis Robert

Bears coach Ben Johnson spent the last year challenging, cajoling and coaching Caleb Williams, and the results were evident as the season progressed and it was clear that Williams’ star is ascendant.

While there’s still plenty of work to be done, Johnson is now declaring himself as Williams’ “No. 1 believer.”

When he was asked about the offseason plan for his QB, Johnson said, “My main message to him was he needs to get out of football for a little bit.”

Johnson wanted Williams, along with everyone else, to decompress from the pressure and stress of the season and take a little break. I’m guessing Johnson hasn’t been on social media or watching this week’s Bulls and Blackhawks games because, well, mission accomplished.

In the days after a heartbreaking overtime loss to the Rams in the divisional round, Williams didn’t hide in his mansion or take off for some exotic locale.

He went to the Hawks game with Cubs outfielder Pete Crow-Armstrong on Monday to see Jonathan Toews’ return and then returned with PCA to watch the Bulls beat the Clippers on Tuesday. He wasn’t in a suite either. They sat on the glass and courtside. And when the camera found him, Williams looked like he was moving on just fine.

Needless to say, Williams and PCA palling around brought great joy to the city’s fans (except for Sox fans, I guess), who are hungry for a new era where every team is full of young, exciting players and the teams compete for championships. Also, they just seem like really chill guys.

So what’s next on his Chicago sports tour? Maybe Williams will help raise Derrick Rose’s banner at the United Center on Saturday night or shotgun beers with the “From The 108” guys at SoxFest Live at the end of the month. DePaul Prep boys’ basketball has a big game against Marist this weekend.

Being quarterback of the Bears either means you’re the most popular guy in town or the most criticized. Right now, Williams is the former, and he’s showing that his personality is befitting of a big-time celebrity. And he’s even more engaging than we realized.

Not every celebrity athlete is like this. I remember a former Bears QB (no names) who always wanted the best tables and best seats and absolutely hated interacting with the public in any capacity. He was completely unsuited to the public side of the job. Williams appears to be the opposite. He’s enjoying being part of the fabric of the city and making people happy.

“That was part of the reason why I said I can do it here,” Williams said Monday. “To bring life, to bring joy, to bring excitement to being a Chicago Bears fan, to be able to cheer for us. I do take pride in it. It’s really cool, honestly, to be able to have those small things like that. Just being able to have the city behind you. You lose that game, you’re walking out of the game, and the fans stand up and cheer and roar in a tough moment. It goes a long way.”

Usually, when we get to the end of a Bears season, there are two options for the head coach and general manager wrap-up news conference: interrogation of why things went so drastically wrong, or … one or both have already been fired and we’re asking a befuddled chairman George McCaskey how he’s going to fix it.

On Wednesday, three days after a heartbreaking overtime playoff loss to the Los Angeles Rams, we heard from GM Ryan Poles and Johnson about a very successful year that reinvigorated a franchise and a fan base while putting the Bears back into the public consciousness as a real contender.

“I’m really excited about seeing this city, this fan base come to life,” Johnson said. “These last two games, I’ll never forget just the energy, the vibe. You could feel that it is a serious home-field advantage that we’re creating here in Chicago.”

“I’ll never forget those playoff games, the games at the end of the season,” Poles said. “They brought it. I had never seen Soldier Field like that before.”

Sadly, we didn’t get a chance to talk to McCaskey or team president Kevin Warren, who were both in attendance. Typically in this situation, they’ll do breakout conferences in the Halas Hall “midway,” where reporters can quiz them about the state of the franchise.

Last year, for example, Warren said the Bears had made “great progress” with their stadium situation and that he was confident there would be “shovels in the ground in 2025.” When I questioned that notion, he politely corrected me.

“When you say, ‘it doesn’t seem like that,’ we have stadium meetings every single day,” he said. “From a political standpoint, from a business standpoint, these things are massive projects. … I think that you’ll see, especially as we get into the spring and summer, you’ll start seeing some of this progress that I’m talking about now. I feel the momentum is really moving in the right direction, and from a stadium standpoint, we’re right exactly where I thought we would be.”

As you might’ve heard, the Bears are going nowhere fast. They are now considering building a stadium in Northwest Indiana as leverage, given the difficulties they are facing in securing public funds for their stadium plan in Arlington Heights. Warren and the Bears have made it a habit this season of upstaging positive Bears news with a leak or a news release about this situation, so it was a bit surprising that they didn’t do the same on Wednesday. Certainly, there would have been questions for them, but their problem is that they don’t have any answers yet.

Will we see shovels in the ground in 2026? That’s a question for another time, apparently.

At the same time that Poles and Johnson met the media in Lake Forest, White Sox GM Chris Getz was doing a Zoom with reporters from his office at 35th and Shields. Some of that interview filtered into the Bears’ conference because a busy reporter who covers both teams had the sound blasting from their computer a couple of times.

In any event, Getz was talking about trading Luis Robert Jr. to the New York Mets, which happened Tuesday night. It was a long time coming.

Getz had been trying to deal Robert for the last two seasons, but the erstwhile budding star had regressed, struggling with injuries and inconsistency and minimizing his trade value. Getz found his taker in the Mets, who will have to pay a significant luxury tax fine, along with the $20 million Robert is owed this season.

In return, the Sox got a former top prospect in infielder/outfielder Luisangel Acuña, who is Ronald’s little brother, along with right-handed pitcher Truman Pauley, a 12th-round pick out of Harvard in 2025.

The 23-year-old Acuña played 95 games with the Mets last season and is out of minor-league options, so he’ll definitely be on the 2026 Sox, likely filling one of the open outfield spots. He has a lot of potential — he recently hit four homers in a game in the Venezuelan winter league — and I know people who are very high on him, though Getz might have been overselling him a bit when he called him one of the “younger, exciting players in the game.” Out of how many?

Robert was the last of the would-be stars of the rebuild — no offense to Andrew Benintendi, who is still here and was more of a harbinger of the carnage to come — and also one of the only players making real money on the roster. He’s been a dead man walking in the Sox clubhouse for years and was probably pretty tired of the uncertainty. The Sox picked up his $20 million option solely to trade him for prospects, and as expected, the return was a bit underwhelming. It’s not like Getz had any leverage.

I enjoyed Getz trying to lie about how they wanted to keep Robert over the years. It became one of my favorite bits.

“It starts with Luis and how we feel about him,” he said, for example, at last season’s trade deadline. “You look at what he’s done in the last month or so, and he’s impacting the game in so many different ways, which speaks to the talent he has. We believe in Luis Robert.”

But if someone really wanted him, what was Getz to do? Some birds aren’t meant to be caged.

As for his post-Robert future, Getz said the Sox will be able to spend some of that $20 million in savings. I would hope so. Their projected payroll is around the $65 million that Jerry Reinsdorf paid the 2004 Sox. Only four players are slated to make more than $1 million, with Benintendi and newcomer Munetaka Murakami accounting for about half the payroll.

It was well past time to move on from Robert. They have some promising young players, many of whom debuted last season, and Murakami could hit some monster dingers on the South Side. The Sox have the No. 1 pick in the draft this summer. Things are looking up, as they tend to do when you’ve already hit the very bottom.

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