Justin Fields is gone and the Chicago Bears are better off without him, and the expectation for Caleb Williams will be huge, but he won’t have to be the greatest for the Chicago Bears to be really good.
Caleb Williams comes into an ideal situation with the Chicago Bears, he doesn’t have to be the greatest QB ever, he just needs to be the best QB in the NFC.
Right now, the best quarterbacks in the NFC have not shown a level of greatness that has elevated the players around them. Despite MVP caliber seasons from Brock Purdy and Dak Prescott, neither one of them has come through in a huge way in the NFC. Yes, Purdy and the 49ers were able to get to the Super Bowl, but Purdy was absolutely awful in the Super Bowl, and before that, absolutely awful against the Baltimore Ravens.
Dak Prescott has one career playoff win and has been absolutely awful against really good teams with good quarterbacks. Jared Goff has been good enough to get to be carried to one Super Bowl, but even Sean McVay realized that for the Rams to be truly great they’d need to get better and they did win one Super Bowl with Matthew Stafford.
Stafford meanwhile is like Kirk Cousins, entering the twilight of his career so it won’t take much for either of them to start to falter enough for a young stud to completely dominate the NFC.
Simply put the greatest QBs currently in the NFL all reside in the AFC where Mahomes, Allen, Burrow, Jackson and possibly CJ Stroud are set to dominate the AFC for the next decade.
The next quarterback of the Chicago Bears only needs to be as good as the best QB in the NFC for the Chicago Bears to dominate the NFC for the next four years. With the situation the Chicago Bears have in place with DJ Moore, Keenan Allen Cole Kmet and the ability to add another top level wide receiver with the ninth overall pick or to trade down collect picks from nine and add a WR three with high potential upside to learn behind two of the best players in the game, puts the Bears in an ideal position to win now.
The pressure is on Caleb Williams to be a generational talent, and he may very well live up to that billing, but for the Bears to dominate he only needs to be better than the best QBs in the NFC, not a tall order. Caleb Williams excelled at USC with one great player over the last two years in Jordan Addison. After that Williams carried the USC offense on his back the past two years against the best conference in college football.
Historically the Pac-12 has been awful, but in 2023 the Pac-12 had seven teams win eight or more games, it had a conference winning record against the rest of the conferences in college football and sent Washington to the national title game. In the games that Williams lost, the Trojans’ defense gave up 43 points a game in each one of those losses. Williams consistently kept the Trojans competitive despite not living up to the expectations of making it to the College Football Playoff.
So far Caleb Williams has proven to be a gamer, now he has to prove that he’s better than his predecessors. And if gauging quarterback success in the NFL was as simple as looking at their W-L record and success against Top-25 teams, then Patrick Mahomes should not be dominating the NFL the way he has after having a losing record during his college career, including a 5-7 mark in his final year.
Quarterbacks who have come out of Lincoln Riley’s offense have had more immediate success year over year than any other program that has sent multiple QBs to the NFL. Baker Mayfield and Kyler Murray have enjoyed pretty good success in the NFL. They haven’t been elite, but Mayfield has been considerably better than any QB the Chicago Bears have ever had, as had Murray.
If Caleb Williams is the best QB to come out of the Riley system, then there will be a lot to be excited for as a fan of the Chicago Bears. Williams being the best QB plus the coming into the best possible offensive situation of any rookie QB since Andrew Luck means the Bears should be the favorites to go from worst to first in 2024.
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