There\u2019s something fitting about the fact that Tom Brady has spent so much time watching and talking to Caleb Williams this season as the second-year quarterback leads the Chicago Bears\u2019 epic NFC North-winning turnaround.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not just because Williams has always idolized Brady, shooting for the stars and hoping to land in the same universe as the man collectively called the \u201cGOAT.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s because the more I watch Williams play, I find myself thinking of Brady. Not what Brady finished his career as, but how he began it.<\/p>\n
True, Brady was the 199th overall pick in his draft, not the first, as Williams was. Brady came into his career as a sixth-round backup to a man in Drew Bledsoe who had just signed the richest contract in history at that time, not a franchise savior expected to rescue a charter organization from mediocrity.<\/p>\n
But once you take the field as a starter in the NFL, none of that really matters. The opposing defense isn\u2019t thinking about your draft pedigree while they\u2019re trying to rip your arms off and break your spirit. They only respect you if you beat them. Over and over again. If you break their will when it matters most.<\/p>\n
When you look at Brady\u2019s stats in that 2001 season, where he started 14 games, they don\u2019t scream \u201cspecial\u201d: 2,843 yards (189.5 per game), 18 touchdowns, 12 interceptions, and a passer rating of 86.5. His Pro Bowl nod felt mostly related to the Pats\u2019 11-3 record with him as a starter, which was again more a product of him being a good steward of the offense.<\/p>\n
But when it was time to win a white-knuckler in his first-ever playoff game against the then-Oakland Raiders, he pulled the game of his life to that point. (Yeah, the Tuck Rule play was a fumble. But it wasn\u2019t called. So be it.) And then we all know what happened in the Super Bowl\u2014the drive that earned him his first championship game MVP and officially launched him to stardom.<\/p>\n
Williams, in a way, has become a new-age version of that. Not in terms of the raw numbers, but in the way he has slowly matured from a game-manager to a game-winner for the Bears.<\/p>\n
The growing pains aren\u2019t over. The accuracy\u2019s not perfect (57.9%). But when the chips are down, there might not be a quarterback you\u2019d rather have facing down a game-winning drive more than Williams, who has spearheaded five of the team\u2019s six game-winning drives in 2026. They don\u2019t call him the Iceman for nothing.<\/p>\n
But like 2001 Brady, the Bears haven\u2019t demanded Williams don the Superman cape for 60 minutes in his crucial second season. They\u2019ve played the kind of football that those early Belichick teams were famous for: physical and ground-based on offense, and opportunistic on defense. They gave him the infrastructure to grow and make his mistakes early, so that he\u2019d have the comfort level to play his best football at the right times: at the end of games and at the close of the season.<\/p>\n
On paper, there\u2019s no reason to assume the Bears should win a Super Bowl right now. There are better teams in their conference, and they don\u2019t have the championship-level defense. But what they do have is ownership of the No. 2 seed (for the moment) and a young quarterback who makes you feel like no game is over until the clock hits zero.<\/p>\n
Sounds a lot like a certain team that kicked off a dynasty 24 years ago.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not saying it\u2019s destiny. But I\u2019m not saying it\u2019s not\u2026<\/p>\n
When I close my eyes, I can just see Caleb Williams at midfield with 20 seconds left in a tied game in the Super Bowl\u2014one play away from making the impossible real.<\/p>\n
Because he\u2019s done it over and over again this year. Because the Bears delivered him a coach who strove to help him harness his gifts so that he could do it when he had to.<\/p>\n
Brady wasn\u2019t Brady until the moment came, and he seized it. In a week, Williams has a chance to start his own legend, as the man whose ghost he\u2019s chasing watches from the booth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There\u2019s something fitting about the fact that Tom Brady has spent so much time watching and talking to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":653822,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2070],"tags":[374,692,391,741,2493,7,53724,6],"class_list":{"0":"post-653821","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-chicago-bears","8":"tag-bears","9":"tag-chicago","10":"tag-chicago-bears","11":"tag-chicago-bears-news","12":"tag-chicagobears","13":"tag-football","14":"tag-from-the-desk-of","15":"tag-nfl"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/115838140458905898","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653821","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=653821"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653821\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/653822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=653821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=653821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=653821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}