Caleb Williams believes he 'can do it' for the Bears, but is the team ready?

Despite some early doubts in the months before he was drafted, Caleb Williams entered the 2024 NFL draft believing that he could turn around the Bears.

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Chicago Bears quarterback Caleb Williams caught quite a bit of undeserved flak over the past week. ESPN released a bombshell article about a forthcoming book about NFL quarterbacks, and in this book, it's revealed that Williams told his father Carl before the draft that he didn't want to go to Chicago.

Of course, lost in the cacophony triggered by such a juicy, gossipy headline was the fact that Williams did eventually come around to playing in Chicago. Following a pre-draft meeting at Halas Hall, Williams told his dad, "I can do it for this team. I'm going to go to the Bears".

By 'it', Williams presumably means 'win a Super Bowl'. He believes he has the talent to lead the Bears back to the Promised Land, and most of the fans do, too. But football is the ultimate team sport, and even the greatest quarterback of all time couldn't win a championship alone.

So the question may not be whether Williams is good enough. Given the historic incompetence of this franchise, the issue is more about whether the Chicago Bears are ready to win.

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First things first, the 2024 season proved that Williams was justified in his concerns about playing in Chicago. The franchise utterly failed him by pairing him with a negligent, lame-duck head coach and coaching staff. And had they stayed the course, then you would already be seeing obituaries written for Williams' career. Maybe even a think-piece or two about finding ways to save quarterbacks from being drafted by teams with a quarterback graveyard.

For the first time in many years, however, the Bears appear to be doing things the right way. They shelled out an unprecedented amount of money to bring in the hottest head coaching candidate on the market, one who has proven capable of elevating talented quarterbacks to the next level. They completely revamped the offensive line after ignoring it for the entirety of the Matt Eberflus era.

Give GM Ryan Poles his credit. He atoned for his original sin of waiting too long to fire Eberflus and has assembled what appears to be a rockstar coaching staff and a massively upgraded roster. On paper, the table appears set for Williams to take the leap to superstardom.

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So are the Bears ready to win? All signs point to 'yes'. If Williams live up to his generational billing, if the roster is as improved as many analysts believe it to be, and if head coach Ben Johnson matches the comparisons he's received to Super Bowl LVI champion Sean McVay, then the Bears should be immediate title contenders and will remain in that tier for many years to come.

But that's a lot of ifs, and as Field Marshall Helmuth von Moltke once said, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. A roster that looks good on paper can go on to lose 11 games, as the Bears did last year. Williams and Johnson could both be flops. It's unlikely, but not impossible.

The path to a Super Bowl begins in September when regular season football is first played. Only then will the Bears have their chance to prove that, finally and for once, the hype around them is deserved. By the end of that month, we should have our answer.

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