2024 NFL Draft: This is the Caleb Williams Draft

The expected first overall pick is ready to shake up the NFL in his own unique way.

The 2023 NFL Draft was one of the most talked about in recent years, with a loaded quarterback class that dominated the headlines going into it, and materialized with some great success for the quarterbacks who featured on these pages last year.

In 2024, the NFL draft is about one name: Caleb Williams.

The current occupier of the first selection, the Chicago Bears, are doing little to hide the fact that they’re likely to select the prospect out of the University of South California on the 25th of April.

Teams burdened with the first overall pick often stay relatively coy about their plans. By not giving too much away, you can maintain some leverage to potentially trade out of the pick for a bigger haul, or can juggle a couple of the top names in the list to keep people guessing. This year, the pick is absolutely certainly going to be Caleb Williams going first overall to the Windy City.

The Bears have already vacated space for the incoming quarterback, trading his predecessor Justin Fields to the Pittsburgh Steelers. Fields was a first round pick in 2021 and after just three seasons in Chicago has been unceremoniously shifted on after failing to truly build on his early potential. They’ve also beefed up the weapons around their prospective new man, including nabbing Keenan Allen from the LA Chargers and signing running back D’Andre Swift.

Williams, at 22-years-old, enters the draft after two record-shattering seasons at USC, having transferring from Oklahoma in early 2022. He won the Heisman Trophy in his first year at USC, throwing for 4,537 yards, 42 TDs, and just five interceptions, and ran for 382 yards and 10 touchdowns.

The Ringer’s draft whizz Danny Kelly describes Williams as “one of the most exciting quarterback prospects in recent memory” with an ability to play off-the-cuff not unlike a certain Patrick Mahomes, with similar traits in playing off-beat, with an ability to throw with absurdly different arm angles and an incredible ability to make plays when structure collapses around him.

He has a strong arm, fantastic accuracy and has been categorized as an elite playmaker. Although he’s not huge for the position at a measly 6’1”, he’s thiccc (with multiple Cs) and has a muscular build that makes him robust enough to combat the rough and tumble of modern NFL as quarterbacks venture around the field.

However, what really makes Williams a unique character is how he has been carrying himself off the field.

Williams has been pushing the stereotype on what many have come to expect from modern athletes, especially those who play the quarterback position. Forever now, the quarterback is seen as the clean cut figurehead that has all the right answers to every question, eats clean, keeps himself out of trouble and avoids controversy. See also—tall, often attractive white guys that parents would let date their daughter.

Williams, on the other hand, has been tagged as football’s first truly “Gen Z poster boy”. He has posed for GQ in a red dress. He paints his fingernails with messages to oppositions teams and has been seen with a pink iPhone and wallet, all major trigger points for the same sub-section of sports fan who got mad at Colin Kaepernick or wear Oakleys and trucker hats in their profile photos.

He is supremely confident in his own skin and this has been a steep curve for old-school football heads to get their heads around. He emits a modern-day leadership and confidence that is very different to the template the NFL has set for decades. The Chicago Bears are unflinchingly old-school, steeped in a deep history of toughness and macho football merits. Drafting a character like Williams would have been outrageous as even as recently as 10 years ago, but as the world evolves so must the stubborn herd of elder football decision-makers. With the Bears taking Williams first overall, they are taking an enormous leap into the modern age.

Williams and his family have reportedly upset the NFL apple cart even more with rumours that they would try to negotiate for equity stakes in his new team, which has since been rubbished. There have been suggestions that he would happily bypass being drafted first overall to avoid the recent basket case of Chicago and end up somewhere he’d prefer, with his father Carl saying the entire draft system “is completely backwards”. There has been an effort to push back on what Williams is selling, but his talent on the videotape is simply too good for any of that outside talk to take any foothold.

Williams is ready to shake up the NFL in his own unique way. He may be drawing comparisons to the likes of Mahomes and other ultra-talented quarterbacks, but he will be one of a kind in a league that is built on copying and pasting other people’s homework. A lot of people won’t be ready, and it’ll be a bit of an adjustment period for onlookers in Chicago, but as soon as Williams hits the field then nobody will care what colour his nail polish is.

Elsewhere in the draft…

• The draft is studded with exciting receivers, most notably Marvin Harrison Jr. This is making plenty of NFL fans feel old as his Hall of Fame father, Marvin Sr., was playing as recently as 2008.

• Williams isn’t the only quarterback star in this draft. Keep an eye out for LSU’s Jayden Daniels, Drake Maye out of North Carolina, Michigan’s JJ McCarthy and Oregon’s Bo Nix. There could well be as many as six QBs taken in the first round on Thursday night.

• The best name in the draft, if not in history—Alabama cornerback Kool-Aid McKinstry.

• A rare unicorn in the NFL—there may well be a white cornerback, Cooper DeJean, drafted in the first round.