How Caleb Williams' head start with Bears offense has helped him in rookie minicamp
How Caleb Williams' head start with Bears offense has helped him in rookie minicamp originally appeared on NBC Sports Chicago
LAKE FOREST, Ill. – One of the benefits of having the No. 1 overall pick in the NFL draft is the ability to start working with that pick a little ahead of schedule. In the Bears’ case, they were able to give Caleb Williams to work on after his top-30 visit at Halas Hall so that he could start incorporating Bears teaching points into his private work.
“We would use the cadence, we would use the drops, we would use all those things,” said Williams at the outset of rookie minicamp.
In the modern NFL it’s extremely common that players retain private coaches so that they can hone their craft all year long, not just when they’re with their respective teams. Williams works with Will Hewlett from the QB Collective. Fortunately for the Bears, new offensive coordinator Shane Waldron also worked at QB Collective and already has a relationship with Hewlett.
Waldron called Hewlett a “big help” in getting Williams onboarded for rookie minicamp.
“There's so many things– how are you going to call a hitch route? Around the league there's probably five or six different ways to call the exact same route in different systems. So before you get into scheme and the offensive breakdown, what are we calling certain footwork, what are we calling individual routes?
“When you even come into rookie minicamp and have a good grasp of that, now you can start to build on that foundation and move forward at a little quicker process.”
The Bears are still in the building block phase of the offseason. They’ll give the rookies as much information as they can handle then evaluate how much of that info they can retain. Then they’ll do the same thing again at OTAs. Every exposure to the concepts, verbiage, schemes and systems helps. And Williams getting a head start could help the offense as a whole get moving sooner rather than later.
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