New book on NFL QBs examines Caleb Williams, Bears and the keys to greatness

New York Times

4 days ago

'Carl Williams was right.'
I thought those four words myself during Caleb Williams' rookie season, but the quote is from Seth Wickersham, the longtime ESPN writer and author of a new book 'American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback', and it admits the obvious: Caleb Williams' father was absolutely correct to be worried about his son ending up with the Chicago Bears.
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The context of that quote was part of a broader point he was making about the 'quarterback dad,' who is 'kind of a secondary character' in Wickersham's engrossing look at our country's most prestigious, challenging profession: NFL quarterback.
We all saw what happened last season. It was every quarterback's dad's worst nightmare, and Carl saw it coming.
'It's easy to think of them as being kind of maniacal and controlling and over the top,' Wickersham said of 'quarterback dads' in a recent phone conversation. 'And there's definitely a lot of that, but there's also a point to it, like Carl Williams was right.'
Carl Williams became a bogeyman of sorts to skittish Bears fans in the run-up to the 2024 NFL Draft, as rumors persisted he was going to pull a move akin to Jack Elway and Archie Manning to get his son out of Chicago's quarterback-cursed clutches. Then there were the outlandish demands he wanted to make about equity in the franchise.
Was it Caleb talking or his dad?
'Carl was serving as his unofficial representative, regardless of whether Caleb was aware of it, regardless of whether Caleb wanted it, regardless of whether Caleb's paid representatives wanted it,' Wickersham writes of the time leading up to the 2024 NFL Combine. 'Members of Caleb's inner circle wanted Carl sidelined. Carl later told me there was some distance between himself and Caleb during this time. Not that he cared. He would chat with agents, telling many, 'I don't want my son playing for the Bears.''
But let's be clear, Caleb was asking questions, too. Just a little quieter.
'Caleb asked those close to him, 'What do you think about the Bears? What do you think, not what does my dad think?'' Wickersham writes.
In the end, Caleb, armed with the confidence of a quarterback, thought he could succeed in Chicago, in spite of the past and the present issues. Unlike John Elway and Eli Manning, he didn't want to make a fuss.
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'I didn't want to nuke the city,' he told Wickersham.
To his credit, Carl didn't make any waves during his son's rollercoaster rookie season, though he would've been right to tweet, 'I told you so.'
Both Williamses were smart to be skeptical. The Bears botched Caleb's rookie year in ways that were fresh and original even by the standards of this franchise.
A year later, you can at least say GM Ryan Poles has made things right with the hiring of Ben Johnson and his staff. Now, the pressure is on Caleb Williams to show he was worth the No. 1 pick, rather than the other way around.
The questions that Wickersham spent three years trying to answer in his fascinating book are basic ones with not-so-easy answers: how do you become a great quarterback in the NFL? And why is it so hard to do?
From coaching to infrastructure to plain old luck, there are many variables. But in the end, it all comes down to the quarterback.
'Football teams are almost reverse-engineered to support their most valuable players, from scheme to psychology,' Wickersham writes. 'But at some point, quarterbacks are alone with a question: 'Can I do it? Can I make the throws when it matters most?''
That's where we find Caleb Williams today.
Caleb Williams entered the 2024 draft as the consensus No. 1 quarterback.
He enters his second season facing questions about his ability to process and play quickly. pic.twitter.com/U1msgeWlt4
— The Athletic (@TheAthletic) August 11, 2025
Wickersham has been writing about the NFL since the dawn of the Tom Brady era. And his knowledge and curiosity shine in 'American Kings,' making it a must-buy for not only every serious football fan but also every actual quarterback, from high school to the Hall of Fame.
In the book, Wickersham spends a lot of time with retired quarterbacks, particularly Elway and Steve Young, wrestling with the psychology and the practice of the most difficult job in sports.
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What did he learn? Well, for one, that once you get to a certain level where you're trying to go from great to legendary, throwing the ball is the easy part. It's everything else that's hard.
But for a second-year pro like Williams, who hasn't accomplished anything more than the best statistical season for a rookie QB in Bears history, the throwing stuff is still worth sweating.
In one section of the book, Wickersham is sitting down with Broncos coach Sean Payton before the 2024 draft. Payton scouted Williams even though he wouldn't be in position to draft him. The QB guru wasn't sold that Williams would excel in the NFL.
For one, Payton has a formula weighted on negative plays in college that informs his evaluations, and Williams' number was higher than Bo Nix and Jayden Daniels.
While Payton loves Williams' arm at USC, he is 'worried a little about his processing speed.' Payton sees 'too many easy completions left on the field, open receivers that Williams fails to spot quickly. But his primary concerns with Williams are existential.'
Payton wonders how Williams will deal with failure at the NFL level. On the surface, I thought Williams answered that question pretty well.
Throughout the twists and turns of the season, Williams was affable and available in public and seemingly liked by his teammates. He played every game, too, despite taking a beating. If being comfortable in your own skin is an attribute every quarterback needs, Williams has it down pat.
But the processing speed that Payton worried about is something that should concern the Bears. Mitch Trubisky and Justin Fields failed here, in part, because they couldn't process the game as fast as you need to at this level, at least in the windows they were given.
While Williams didn't throw many interceptions last season, he also got sacked 68 times. He completed just 62.5 percent of his passes.
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Beyond all the psychology, anticipating in an instant and throwing the ball where it needs to go is a must for any successful NFL quarterback. In Mike Sando's just-released quarterback tiers, it's the biggest question NFL people have about him.
College football is a game played on the outside, while in the NFL, with tighter hash marks, quarterbacks have to be able to live in the middle of the field. Williams has to prove he can excel in the chaos of the pocket, but he shouldn't be judged too harshly given the context of his rookie season.
'To me, a rookie year is about survival, that's basically it,' Wickersham said. 'You're really just trying to survive and you know he not only survived, but he showed a lot of potential.'
Wickersham didn't address much of Williams' first NFL year in the book, though he did a fact-checking exercise with Caleb in late January, where he confirmed his father's anecdote that, yes, he complained to his dad about watching film by himself at Halas Hall.
'He liked the coaches as people, but struggled to connect with them as football minds,' Wickersham writes. 'At times, he would watch film alone, with no instruction or guidance from the coaches. 'No one tells me what to watch,' Caleb told his dad. 'I just turn it on.''
That anecdote blew up when ESPN put out a small news story from the book in mid-May. Williams eventually addressed it after a two-week delay, only disputing the idea that he didn't know how to watch film. Matt Eberflus, now coaching in Dallas, refuted the idea that the coaches left him out to dry.
'He was talking about learning how to be more efficient,' Wickersham said. 'You know, you're supposed to have the infrastructure to do that when you pick a quarterback first overall and put your franchise in his hands. What he was asking for was not unreasonable at all.'
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In the book, Wickersham notes that both Williamses were skeptical of Eberflus, a defensive coach, and weren't enamored with the idea of Shane Waldron as offensive coordinator. Williams' performance took off a bit after Waldron was canned midseason.
'I think that way he'd been brought up in that QB Collective group, which is kind of like the Shanahan tree and they run all these camps, but they really try to teach you the Mike Shanahan offense when you're in high school, and he loved that,' Wickersham said. 'I think he understood the difference between the people who were copying a playbook and those who were taking what they had learned and innovating beyond that. And I think that he wanted to be linked with someone who was an innovator.'
As McDaniel thought about Williams — he met him nearly a decade ago while coaching at a QB Collective camp and has followed his career closely — and Johnson trying to figure each other out, he urged them to embrace inevitable conflict as a path to growth. #CollectiveFootball… pic.twitter.com/N8gF6UrNUr
— COLLECTIVE FOOTBALL (@QBCollective) August 10, 2025
During the draft process, Caleb wanted to find a way to get to Minnesota, where Kevin O'Connell was coaching. That didn't happen, but linking up with Johnson should prove whether or not he has what it takes to be a successful NFL quarterback, if not a dominant one.
'It took a year, but the Williams finally have what they wanted, which is an innovative offensive mind whose fate is rooted in Caleb succeeding, and I think that's really the best chance you can ask for,' Wickersham said.
Wickersham had the time and the contacts to 'stress test' the people he wanted to write about. He traveled the country, from going to an event honoring Warren Moon at his old Los Angeles high school, to visiting with Johnny Unitas' family, to spending so much time at Isidore Newman practice that Arch Manning thought he was a coach. Some quarterbacks were left on the cutting-room floor.
Caleb Williams made the cut for the book, in part, because he and his father were so vocal about their plan to get to the top.
'I think that what made Caleb interesting is that his dad walks into the coach's office in high school and says, 'I want to work backwards from first pick in the draft,'' Wickersham said. ''We think he can be the first pick in the draft. How do we do that?' That's just a mind-blowing thought and idea and vision. You have to be a little irrational, a little willing to be daring and put yourself out there to make it in this space, I think, and my god, it worked.'
Yes, it worked. Williams was the No. 1 pick, but now comes the really hard part. Does he have what it takes to be one of the greats?
This is the question that drove Wickersham to spend years writing this book. For Williams, it's one that only he can answer.
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