Caleb Williams Isn't the Only No. 1 Quarterback Whose Team Hasn't Set Him Up For Success

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Caleb Williams Isn't the Only No. 1 Quarterback Whose Team Hasn't Set Him Up For Success

Doug Farrar · Athlon Sports

Sat, May 17, 2025 ·

14 min read

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"Football is circumstantial." — Brian Billick

It's now a well-known fact that Carl Williams, Caleb Williams ' father, had no interest in his son ever being selected by the Chicago Bears with the first overall pick in the 2024 draft. As reported by ESPN's Seth Wickersham , Carl Williams believed that Chicago was "the place quarterbacks go to die." Given the fact that the Bears have never had a quarterback throw for more than 4,000 yards in a season, and their last great quarterback was Sid Luckman (who retired after the 1950 NFL season, by the way), the elder Williams may have been on to something.

In Wickersham's upcoming book, American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback , it's also revealed that after the Bears did take Williams first overall, they basically showed him where the team film room was, and gave him no help at all when it came to using that film to understand what he would be doing in the NFL on offense, and how to counter the defenses he would be facing.

At times, Williams said he would watch film alone, with no instruction or guidance from the coaches. "No one tells me what to watch," Caleb Williams told his dad. "I just turn it on."

The results were understandably iffy. While second-overall pick Jayden Daniels of the Washington Commanders had perhaps the best rookie season any NFL quarterback has ever enjoyed in a Kliff Kingsbury-led offense that played perfectly to Daniels' strengths, Williams did the best he could with all he didn't have. He completed 361 of 562 passes for 3,541 yards, 20 touchdowns, six interceptions, and a passer rating of 87.8. Behind a patchwork offensive line, and going through his own timing issues, Williams was sacked a league-high 68 times, and overall, the Bears' offense was a disorganized disaster.

Now, in his second NFL season, after cycling through two head coaches and three different offensive coordinators in 2024, Williams has a much better setup with new head coach Ben Johnson, who actually knows how to develop quarterbacks. Johnson would just prefer to move on from what happened before, which is entirely understandable.

"I see this as what a great opportunity we have to do something that really has never been done," Johnson said on Thursday in response to the ESPN article. "There hasn't been a 4,000-yard passer here in this franchise. And I think Caleb is going to be the first one. And one of many years, many seasons to come, where he's able to accomplish that feat. So I see a chance for greatness here for him.

"[It's] been communicated that way, and he feels the same way. I don't know what's gone on prior to joining the organization, but he is very proud to be a Chicago Bear. That's what our conversations have included. And he's really excited to get to work right now and be the best version of himself for 2025. There's no question we're going to face adversity. We want to see growth from here to here over the course of the season.

"It's not going to be linear growth. It's going to be a little bit of ups and downs and stairsteps along the way. But we want to see from Game 1 to Game 17 that we're getting better as a whole. And that's not just him. That's us as a team as well. So I'm excited.

"That's what makes coaching fun is when the hiccups occur, when the adversity strikes, how do we respond to it? That's when you find out who you are as a man."

Former NFL quarterback and current ESPN analyst Dan Orlovsky was utterly aghast at the prior mishandling of Williams' potential.

"When I saw that quote, I was like, there's no way that's true," Orlovsky told Athlon Sports. "Because while I've been fortunate enough to be a part of the NFL for a long time, I still struggle to actually believe some of the things that you read about what happens in the league. So my initial thought was like, there's no way that that happened. There's no way that you as an organization [have] the number one pick, that you don't think that that's an important step in the process.

"Seth does such good reporting, [so] I start to get frustrated after reading it and thinking about it because I'm like, if that is true, and I would assume it is, it's just so infuriating that an organization and a staff did not think that that was, I would argue, the most important part of [Williams'] developmental process."

Williams isn't the only quarterback taken first overall in a draft to be subsequently abandoned in the film room, so to speak. The number of times that this coaching malpractice has occurred over the last 20 years would likely blow the minds of every NFL observer, but it's definitely out there.

And as it turns out, Orlovsky knows of what he speaks when it comes to quarterbacks selected first overall in the draft, and subsequently given absolutely no help in the film room.

Sean McVay had to teach Jared Goff everything — and he had help

The Los Angeles Rams selected Cal quarterback Jared Goff with the first overall pick in the 2016 draft, and it didn't go well at all to start. Goff had one of the worst rookie seasons ever for someone at his position, completing just 112 of 205 passes for 1,089 yards, five touchdowns, seven interceptions, and a passer rating of 63.6. That led to a head coaching change, as the Rams hired former Washington Redskins offensive coordinator Sean McVay to run the team, and take charge of Goff's development.

One of the first things McVay did was to reach out to Orlovsky, whose career as an NFL quarterback had just come to an end, to give some extremely necessary help to Goff.

Technically, Orlovsky was signed as the Rams' third quarterback through training camp, but that was not his job. His job was to teach Goff how to watch tape from the ground up. Because in 2016, it was clear that former offensive coordinator Rob Boras and his staff had not done that... at all.

"'You're not going to do anything in training camp, Dan,' Orlovsky recalls McVay telling him. "'I just need you to teach him how to study tape, and teach him about defenses.'

"So I was like, "'All right, great.'

"And this isn't a knock on Jared at all. Jared will tell you this straight up. I go out there, and every day, we would study tape in the meeting rooms. I would then go to Jared's house and he had spent money, because Jared wanted to learn. He built himself a film study room.

"And I started with him the way that I was fortunate enough to get taught, because I got taught from Gary Kubiak and Greg Knapp and Matt LaFleur and Kyle Shanahan — how to truly study tape. I actually started in high school and college because it was a mandate because I was less talented.

"These are Honest-to-God stories, and Jared [would] tell you. I remember early days with Jared, my starting point would be, Jared, we're in an under front, and he would give me a look. I would be internally going, okay. All right, Jared, if we get an over front, and he would give me a look.

"I realized... do you know what over and under fronts are? And he's like, no. So he didn't even know — the number one pick in the NFL draft, what an over or under front was. I learned that in high school.

"That was like the eye-opening thing for me — it was like, oh, okay. One of my things was, and I feel this probably the same way about a Caleb [Williams] or whoever, it wasn't that Jared was dumb. He wasn't taught, right? He was uneducated in that. And so we had to spend so much time, Jared learning defensive fronts and then how those defensive fronts were attached to the linebacker alignment, and how that linebacker alignment was attached to secondary alignment, and then different coverages.

"So, he had to like play big-time catch-up."

Eventually, it all worked out. Goff had his growing pains, as any quarterback would in the NFL with such remedial knowledge to start, but as the Detroit Lions ' quarterback of today, and certainly in his recent development under Ben Johnson, Goff now runs the show.

Which should give Caleb Williams believers hope.

Alex Smith , and the 49ers ' folly

(Mark J. Rebilas-Imagn Images © 2005 Mark J. Rebilas)

The San Francisco 49ers selected Utah quarterback Alex Smith with the first overall pick in the 2025 draft, and things went similarly horribly at the start. In his rookie season, Smith — who had played in a spread offense under Urban Meyer in college at a time when "spread offense" was considered a profanity in the NFL — completed 84 of 165 passes for 875 yards, one touchdown, 11 interceptions, and a passer rating of 40.8. Smith's inaugural NFL season was even worse than Goff's, and one of the primary reasons was the same.

Nobody in the 49ers organization that year gave Smith the required guidance to know what he was doing when he watched tape.

I also spoke with Wickersham for this article, and he presented a fascinating connection between Williams in 2024 and Smith 20 years earlier.

"In February, I was talking to Caleb, and I had been told that he would complain and kind of just throw up his arms that he would watch film by himself," Wickersham said. "And we were talking about Alex Smith, and Alex told me about this, and it's something he's talked about, where he got to the 49ers, he's 20 years old, he's the face of the franchise, and nobody would watch film with him.

"He was sitting in a room, in the dark, just watching tape. No idea what to look at, no idea what to study, no idea what to replay or analyze or take notes on or make marks on and try to improve, no idea what questions to ask. He was by himself.

"Now, Alex, of course, came out before the rookie wage scale, so it was a massive investment [Smith signed a six-year, $49.5 million contract with $24 million guaranteed, which were huge numbers at the time]. One would think that with that kind of investment, they would populate him with an entire infrastructure to help him be successful, but they didn't."

And they didn't for years. Smith eventually recovered from all that and had a productive NFL career with the 49ers, Kansas City Chiefs , and Washington Redskins/Football Team, and he also used his own early travails to inform the assistance he gave to another young quarterback.

"When Alex later ended up with the Chiefs, and they drafted a guy named Patrick Mahomes [in 2017], he made a point of teaching Patrick how to be an NFL quarterback," Wickersham said. "And one of those key areas is how to watch film. The head coach can't watch film with the quarterback all day, even one like Andy Reid, who obviously is an innovative offensive mind.

"And Alex had to teach Patrick, this is what we're doing on Mondays, this is what we do on Tuesdays, Wednesday we do this, Thursday, Thursday's a long day, we're going to do this on Thursday, Friday, this is what we prepare for. He taught him that rhythm and how to do it.

"And I think that Patrick would have been a successful quarterback no matter what, but I think that we just can't overstate how important it is to have someone as savvy as Alex Smith, as generous as Alex Smith is, by the way, because not every veteran quarterback would do that, but just somebody who was looking out for him."

Well, some guys get that early help... and some clearly don't.

How on Earth does this keep happening?

It's certainly a valid question, when three different NFL franchises over the last two decades have abandoned their first-overall pick signal-callers, and ostensible faces of the franchises, when they hit the door.

These franchises are not always as advanced in their processes as you might think.

"Years ago, I was getting drinks with a long-time team president," Wickersham said. "And we were talking about NFL teams, and the decision-making, and how things are operated. How we think of NFL teams as these huge Fortune 500 companies when in fact, they're kind of mom-and-pop shops for the most part. And he said, billion-dollar lemonade stands.

"And I was like, what? And he said, they're billion-dollar lemonade stands, because multimillion-dollar decisions are made with almost no thought sometimes. And I was stunned to hear that. But I thought about it a lot within the context of Caleb and Carl [Williams] and their process leading up to the draft, because Carl knew. He's an astute, sophisticated businessman. He knew that as good as his son is, that his success as a pro quarterback would largely be determined by who picked him. And we like to think that these things don't matter, that great quarterbacks can transcend everything.

"But that's not the case. This is real life. And he didn't want his son to end up like Alex Smith, for instance, who had so much turnover during his first five, six years in the NFL, that it's amazing that he came out okay on the other end.

"All of Carl Williams' premonitions came true about the reasons why he saw landmines with the Bears drafting [Caleb]. And now, he finally has the situation that he and his dad wanted when he was coming out through the draft, which is an innovative offensive mind who's wholly invested in his success."

Caleb Williams wasn't the first high-profile quarterback to be abandoned in the film room, Sadly, he also won't be the last. The only hope is that the next guy is also eventually given the tools for success that will have eluded his predecessors.

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