Caleb Williams got no guidance on how to watch film

The ESPN.com item regarding quarterback Caleb Williams generated the biggest headlines regarding his interest in avoiding the Bears. There’s another headline lurking in one of the later paragraphs of the article regarding his experience with the Bears in 2024.

Here’s the relevant paragraph from the story, derived from Seth Wickersham’s upcoming book, American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback: “At times, Williams said he would watch film alone, with no instruction or guidance from the coaches. ‘No one tells me what to watch,’ Caleb Williams told his dad. ‘I just turn it on.’”

That’s a damning claim. It underscores the dysfunction the Bears have endured for years — and it raises questions about whether new coach Ben Johnson will be able to truly change things in Chicago.

Obviously, Johnson has proven his chops as an offensive mastermind. Williams will be in far better hands than he was a year ago. If nothing else, he’ll know how to watch film.

Still, the Bears have been too blah for too long to just assume everything wil be changed overnight. The same group that hired Johnson thought it would be prudent a year earlier to keep Matt Eberflus and to make Shane Waldron the offensive coordinator (and not, say, Kliff Kingsbury, who did a pretty good job with Jayden Daniels in D.C.).

We’re giving the Bears the benefit of the doubt. We’ll assume the Chico’s Bail Bonds days are over. But that one small piece of Thursday’s ESPN article serves as a reminder that dysfunctional teams do dysfunctional things — and that the dysfunction in Chicago has run far deeper than the pizza pans.