There’s some tea-leaf reading we can do here. Until this weekend, the Bears had planned to bring USC Trojans QB Caleb Williams to Chicago for his top 30 visit Tuesday, fresh off the combine. That is extraordinarily early—most teams don’t even with 30 visits until the end of March or beginning of April when pro days are wrapping up.
The idea was pretty simple. Chicago wanted to check some final boxes before finalizing its plan at quarterback before free agency starts next week. In the end, Williams and the team decided to move things around: Rather than shuttling the quarterback to and from California again, in the midst of preparations for his March 20 pro day, the Bears will host Williams in Chicago shortly after that instead.
But the idea alone tells you plenty about where the team is.
In an ideal world, the Bears would be able to go through a complete process in assessing this year’s quarterback class before deciding what to do with Justin Fields. Alas, the world Chicago is living in now isn’t such an ideal one. Simply put, it’s not practical for Chicago to wait until mid-April, when the spots available for veteran quarterbacks across the league have filled up, to trade Fields.
It wouldn’t allow for the Bears to maximize Fields’s value. It also wouldn’t be doing right by Fields, which is what Chicago GM Ryan Poles told the media he wants to do.
And so living in this unideal world, with a tighter timeline as a result, the Bears have been aggressive in getting answers on Williams, who they see as a unique talent who has separated himself from the rest of the quarterbacks. It started when the season ended, with team brass having an honest conversation with Fields about the unique position they were in—carrying the first pick after finishing the season strong, thanks to last year’s deal that sent the 2023 first pick off to the Carolina Panthers.
After that …
• In dispatching his scouts to all-star games, Poles directed evaluators to ask about the 2022 Heisman winner when they interviewed Oklahoma Sooners or USC players, or others who crossed paths with Williams. The returns there were good. Sometimes, you can get awkward pauses, if players are lukewarm on teammates they’re asked about. It was the opposite in this case. The mention of Williams’s name brought about a lot of smiles.
• In interviewing then USC assistant Kliff Kingsbury for their offensive coordinator job in Los Angeles in January, the Bears did a ton of fact-finding. Kingsbury described a player beloved by his coaches and teammates, and also gave the Bears very real insight into Williams’s father, and how involved he was. The quarterback’s dad, Kingsbury told them, was sharp, and someone that Williams leaned on a lot business-wise. But the father left the football part to his kid; Kingsbury explained to Chicago he saw the dad maybe once last year at USC’s practice facility.
• And there was, of course, evaluating film. Maybe the most interesting part (to me, at least) is how Poles’s background with the Kansas City Chiefs, working under GMs John Dorsey and Brett Veach, changed the way he, and so many other scouts, looked at the quarterback position. In identifying, drafting, and then watching the career of Patrick Mahomes, all those people learned to put a greater premium on creativity and playmaking at the position.
That left the Bears to come to Indianapolis for the combine to move into the final stages of firming up their quarterback plan.
On Wednesday at 10:40 p.m. (the second-to-last window of the night), Chicago had its formal interview with Williams in the suites of Lucas Oil Stadium. Poles was joined by the five people who are the point men in the Williams evaluation process: coach Matt Eberflus, offensive coordinator Shane Waldron, pass-game coordinator Thomas Brown, assistant GM Ian Cunningham and team president Kevin Warren.
What they saw from Williams in that setting was an easy confidence, and a player who was not concerned much with what other people thought of him. That last part is key, because the Bears have tried to drill down on making sure the person they pick first can handle the pressure and spotlight of the Chicago market.
Williams checked that box. The next one came Friday night, when Bears brass got a chance to sit down and meet with the quarterback’s team, as a precursor to the 30 visit.
When that visit does happen, Williams will undergo a physical (he declined to take part in medical testing in Indianapolis, which we’ll have more on in a bit) and have a litany of meetings. There, Chicago will make sure the fit is there, and that the chemistry between coaches and front office folks and Williams is apparent. And while checking those boxes won’t be akin to turning the card in on April 25, it will get the Bears one step closer to that.
For now, though, while Poles has positioned the Bears to trade Fields in the coming days, he’s also open to waiting a bit if it takes time for the QB market, with Kirk Cousins and Baker Mayfield as headliners, to develop. The key is the team has flexibility; Chicago will be realistic in finding the right return for the 11th pick in the 2021 draft. It’s probably not getting a first-rounder, and it hasn’t been working off any assumption that it will be. Instead, they Bears have looked at historical data points as models.
One was the San Francisco 49ers’ trade of Alex Smith to the Chiefs, which happened when Poles was a young scout in Kansas City. The trade was for a high second-round pick in 2013 (No. 34), and a conditional pick in ’14 (a third-rounder that became a second after Kansas City hit eight wins in ’13). Smith was traded again in ’18, from Kansas City to the Washington Commanders, for a third-round pick and veteran corner Kendall Fuller. That cleared the way for Mahomes to take over.
A second model was the New York Jets’ trade of Sam Darnold to the Panthers in 2021, with New York landing a sixth-round pick in ’21, and second- and fourth-rounders in ’22 to get Darnold. That, of course, cleared the decks for the Jets to take Zach Wilson at No. 2.
Whether the Bears can hit these comps remains to be seen. Fields’s contract certainly complicates the matter. A trading team would get him for $2.3 million this year, but would have to make a decision in May on his $25.7 million option for 2025, knowing declining it and getting a good year from Fields would make him more expensive to keep in a year. And as for potential teams, the Atlanta Falcons and Pittsburgh Steelers have at least explored it.
But either way, the main thing here isn’t what the return—based on what’s been ballparked to me over the past couple of months, a package of a Day 2 pick and a Day 3 pick would make sense—winds up being. It’s the decision that’s coming down the pike for the Bears.
A decision that, yes, could be made pretty soon.
