Months before Rome Odunze ever shared an airplane ride with new Bears teammate Caleb Williams, he was grounded.
The Washington receiver took a knee to the midsection while fielding a game-clinching onside kick at Arizona on Sept. 30. The blow broke his ribs and punctured his lung, sending him to a hospital in Tucson for the night.
He was released at dawn, but doctors advised against flying because of the lung injury. So Odunze, his mom Necia Bunnell and a Washington trainer rented a Chrysler 300 and started driving back to campus in Seattle.
“They took turns driving me … ” he said Thursday night, two hours after the Bears drafted him ninth overall. “It was a long drive, a lot of movies watched and music listened to and stories told.”
They stopped for Slurpees and beef jerky. He ate a McDonald’s breakfast — hash browns, orange juice and all.
The car dropped his mom off in their hometown of Las Vegas after 410 miles — Odunze so loves the city he wore socks with dice to his introductory press conference Friday at Halas Hall.
The road trip continued to Salt Lake City, where they picked up another Huskies trainer, 420 miles later. Eventually, 840 miles after that, the car made it to Seattle. All told, Odunze spent 23 hours on the road over two days — while in significant pain and unable to stretch out.
“Any of my brothers probably would have gone out and done that,” he said.
The reason: the Huskies had a bye the next week and their biggest game of the year after that. Odunze vowed to be ready to play against rival Oregon — and was.
The seventh-ranked Huskies beat the No. 8 Ducks 36-33. Two weeks removed from puncturing a lung, Odunze had eight catches for 128 yards and two touchdowns, including the game-winner. With 1:44 to play and trailing by four, quarterback Michael Penix threw a back-shoulder fade to Odunze. He caught the ball facing the sideline and tiptoed both feet into the purple end zone for the score.
It was the favorite play of his college career.
“There wasn’t anything that I wouldn’t do to be ready for that game,” he said. “There was a bunch of players on that team fighting through injuries and doing similar things to that. It fit the uniform of the team.”
The team went undefeated in the regular season and beat Texas in the national semifinal before losing by 21 to Michigan in the championship game.
Odunze led all FBS players with 1,640 yards, which was a Huskies record and 91 yards shy of the most in Pac-12 history.
“You love his ability to finish in contested situations,” general manager Ryan Poles said. “Plays strong, plays big, run after catch is very good. … The kid’s just put time in, and he got better and better every single year, and he’s a winner.
“He can impact the game at any moment. If you’re at quarterback, and you’re in doubt, you want to just go give a guy an opportunity to go finish, he’s your guy. He’s done that consistently.”
What makes the Bears’ selection of Odunze at No. 9 overall Thursday so compelling is the man whom they took first: USC quarterback Caleb Williams. What started off as mutual respect between the two — Odunze led all Huskies receivers in a 10-point win against USC in November — turned into a friendship this offseason.
“When you watch him play, there are things he can do on the field you don’t see any other quarterback doing,” Odunze said. “He brings a unique skill set. He’s very confident in the pocket, very confident extending a play. And the play is never over until the whistle is blown, you know that.”
Odunze shares that tenacity. Long after Lucas Oil Stadium was cleared of participating NFL Scouting Combine players on March 2, Odunze kept doing the three-cone drill. He’d vowed to finish it in 6.6 seconds. Officials eventually told him he had to leave.
“I wasn’t leaving the field until I had completed every single task I said I was going to compete,” he said.
Williams invited Odunze to a throwing session he had with Bears receivers Keenan Allen and DJ Moore last week. By circumstance, Williams and Odunze were on the same flight to Detroit, sitting near each other in first class.
Wednesday, they talked openly of how special it would be to land on the same team. When it happened Thursday, Williams fought the urge to spike a plastic water bottle in celebration while standing backstage at the NFL draft.
“I was wishing for Rome Odunze to my people and my family — that he’d be my teammate,” Williams said.
Friday morning, they shared first-class flight to Chicago, the first time Odunze had ever gone private.
Moore and Allen knew how to congratulate their new teammates. They texted in the same thread they used to set up last week’s throwing session.
The trio of receivers hope to shape the way the Bears — a team synonymous with defense for more than a century — are viewed. That was what happened at Washington the past two years, Odunze said.
“There’s no other way around it,” he said. “We’re going to have success offensively.”
It’s all enough to make Odunze believe in fate. He was a Bears fan growing up. His first jersey was a Brian Urlacher model, and his favorite player was Devin Hester. He wore out a YouTube highlight reel of Hester returning kicks for touchdowns while Lil Wayne’s “Catch Me If You Can” blared.
“It’s kind of surreal, just because all of those things are coincidences, right?” Odunze said. “But you start to think about it, and it’s like, ‘Man, is it really a coincidence?’
“You speak it into existence. All of these different things, these coincidences happen and now I’m here. It just makes it that much more special, and it kind of seems like it was meant to be.”
