Ask Bears offensive coordinator Shane Waldron what first jumped out at him on film about former USC star quarterback Caleb Williams, and he doesn’t point to any of the highlight-reel plays from his Heisman Trophy–winning 2022 season.
Instead, he tells you about the last game Williams played — a butt-kicking at the hands of rival UCLA. On Nov. 18, the Trojans lost the most important game of their season 38-20 and spent most of the second half trailing by no fewer than 15 points.
After the Bruins returned a fumble to go up by 18 about five minutes into the third quarter, Williams completed 10 of 15 passes for 125 yards. More important, he kept his head up.
“To me, you see the competitor,” Waldron said Saturday before the second of two rookie-minicamp practices, “the championship mindset where he’s going to be at his best, no matter the situation around him, and keep playing. . . .
“Everyone is good in the NFL. Every week, you’re playing against great people on defense, great schemes, and so that ability, regardless of what’s going on with the external noise or the situation in a game, play every play as its own individual snap. He demonstrated that.
“Take away all the highlight reels. That was a good moment.”
In his first year at Halas Hall, it will be Waldron’s job to ensure that Williams has more highlights than grind-it-out moments in his rookie season. Both are starting in a good place. Asked what he finds most compelling about Williams’ play, Waldron unknowingly pointed to something that eluded Justin Fields and Mitch Trubisky.
Neither Fields nor Trubisky was an instinctual passer. Fields’ arm strength was never questioned — he threw a pretty deep ball — but he was more like a center fielder trying to throw a runner out at home. Williams plays like a shortstop, able to make pinpoint throws with his arm at different angles.
“His arm talent and his ability to put the ball where it needs to be, that’s evident from Day 1,” Waldron said. “Now it’s about keeping [up] the learning and progressing and keep moving forward with our system. The arm talent, with what he’s able to do, is fun to watch.”
Williams began training to be a Bear long before the draft. Waldron held Zoom calls with Will Hewlett, Williams’ private coach and a longtime acquaintance of the coordinator, and explained preferences for everything from cadence to verbiage to footwork. As a result, Williams was “light-years ahead” when coming to rookie minicamp, quarterbacks coach Kerry Joseph said. His hunger to get better prompted an 11 p.m. text to Joseph on Friday night, simply to ask why a blocking scheme was drawn up a certain way.
Similarly, the Bears began preparing for Williams long before the draft, with Waldron dreaming up the best ways to use his skills.
“It’s not like you’re turning over your whole offense to a guy, but what other nuances can we do within the offense to help him be successful and put him in a great situation?” said Joseph, who worked with Waldron for three years in Seattle. “That’s what coaching is about, and that’s one thing that I love about working with Shane.”
Like Trubisky and Fields before him, the Bears are focused on teaching Williams how to speak their language.
“The plays, the schemes, those things will happen as we keep building an offense,” Waldron said. “But right now, the core of it? Each building in football, you speak so many different languages, and a lot of the words mean the same thing. But you gotta figure out, ‘What’s our language? What’s the language for the 2024 Chicago Bears?’ ”
At the least, it will be an exciting one.
“For me to see where he’s at now, it’s impressive,” Joseph said. “And to see his physical traits, it’s unbelievable.”
