{"id":226289,"date":"2025-07-22T05:44:08","date_gmt":"2025-07-22T05:44:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/226289\/"},"modified":"2025-07-22T05:44:08","modified_gmt":"2025-07-22T05:44:08","slug":"bears-almost-picked-michigansj-j-mccarthy-over-caleb-williams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/226289\/","title":{"rendered":"Bears almost picked Michigan&#8217;s\nJ.J. McCarthy over Caleb Williams"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Much like anything with Michigan football and its players, there are a lot of narratives out there that just aren&#8217;t true. One of them, coming out of the 2023 national championship season, was that quarterback J.J. McCarthy was a &#8216;handoff merchant&#8217; and couldn&#8217;t throw.<\/p>\n<p>Yet, he went at No. 10 overall to the Minnesota Vikings in the 2024 NFL draft. It turns out, he almost went higher.<\/p>\n<p>The Athletic did a profile on McCarthy and Vikings quarterbacks coach Greg Holcomb revealed that Chicago Bears general manager, Ryan Poles, nearly ended up taking the former <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/sportsdata.usatoday.com\/football\/ncaaf\/teams\/michigan-wolverines\/3435\/\" data-autotag=\"768439b8-87f7-44fb-88d2-8a23806615b0\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Wolverines<\/a> star with the No. 1 overall pick instead of USC standout and Heisman Trophy winner Caleb Williams.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/6502245\/2025\/07\/21\/jj-mccarthy-vikings-training-camp-2025\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Via The Athletic<\/a>: (subscription required)<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHe was talking about how much they (the Bears) loved J.J.,\u201d Holcomb said. \u201cAnd said to me, \u2018I don\u2019t think people realize how close we were to possibly taking him.\u2019 Obviously, they love (No. 1 pick) Caleb (Williams), but I thought that was interesting.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>McCarthy suffered a season-ending injury in preseason last year but is expected to start this year. He&#8217;ll have a tough road with the NFC North going from one of the worst divisions in the NFL to one of the strongest, with an ascending Bears team, a powerful Lions squad, and a perennial playoff team in the Packers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Much like anything with Michigan football and its players, there are a lot of narratives out there that&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":226290,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[323,3689,247,265,322,20844,1700,1036,1443,318,339,3690,7,3688,20842,957,73,248,267,246,88,6,15,245,264,3605,3609,9,266,678,3691,3606,607,3983],"class_list":{"0":"post-226289","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nfl-draft","8":"tag-323","9":"tag-ai","10":"tag-american","11":"tag-american-football","12":"tag-big","13":"tag-big-10-hub","14":"tag-caleb","15":"tag-caleb-williams","16":"tag-california","17":"tag-college","18":"tag-college-sports","19":"tag-enabled","20":"tag-football","21":"tag-highlights","22":"tag-hub","23":"tag-michigan","24":"tag-michigan-wolverines-football","25":"tag-national","26":"tag-national-sports","27":"tag-neutral","28":"tag-news","29":"tag-nfl","30":"tag-nfl-draft","31":"tag-overall","32":"tag-overall-neutral","33":"tag-southern","34":"tag-southern-california-trojans-football","35":"tag-sports","36":"tag-sports-news","37":"tag-story","38":"tag-story-highlights-ai-enabled","39":"tag-trojans","40":"tag-williams","41":"tag-wolverines"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/114895301238326203","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=226289"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226289\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/226290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=226289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=226289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=226289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}