Chicago Bears felt Caleb Williams has gifts that can’t be coached
The Chicago Bears’ pursuit of Caleb Williams, leading to his selection as the No. 1 pick in the 2024 NFL draft, involved a lot of different discoveries and conclusions. Albert Breer of Sports Illustrated unearthed one epiphany: The Bears arrived at the belief that Caleb Williams had traits which couldn’t be coached:
“Some came from national scout Francis St. Paul and West Coast area scout Reese Hicks, who kept telling Poles that he needed to get back out to California, and around the people at USC. He’d find out, they promised, that the narratives that circled Williams while the Trojans’ season circled the drain weren’t real. Investigate it yourself, they said. Read our reports. Investigate it.
“Meanwhile, Poles, assistant GM Ian Cunningham and director of player personnel Jeff King had drilled down on the tape and started to form a conclusion that Williams was simply different from the rest of the class. The issues he did show—mainly his fumbling and risk-taking tied to playmaking—could be coached. And he had stuff you couldn’t coach in spades, to the point that Poles was reminded of evaluating Patrick Mahomes as a young Kansas City Chiefs exec in 2017.”
The mistakes can be coached away. The gifts can’t be coached out of the system. That’s the summation of a player with a lot of upside and relatively little risk. The Bears reached that conclusion with Caleb Williams.
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