Bestselling author goes deep on his Caleb Williams bombshells—details you haven’t heard

How to freak out a Chicago Bears fan in four easy steps:

• 1) Uncover some disturbing revelations about the young face of Chicago’s franchise.

• 2) Put said disturbing revelations in a book that will hit the shelves right at the beginning of the 2025 NFL season.

• 3) Months before the book drops, sit back and watch as your high-profile employer—in this case, ESPN—teases a few details of said revelations.

• 4) Follow up the ESPN article with a series of deep dive interviews.

Which, last week, is exactly what Seth Wickersham did.  

Chicago, Illinois: Quarterback Graveyard?

In an in-depth chat with Chicago Sports Stuff, Wickersham dug into a section from his forthcoming book, American Kings: A Biography Of the Quarterback, in which he reported that before the 2024 NFL Draft, Caleb Williams and his father Carl looked for a legal pathway to circumvent the league’s collective bargaining agreement in order to keep the USC signal caller from landing in Chicago.

Of the pre-draft machinations, the ESPN senior writer and author of the 2021 bestseller It’s Better to Be Feared: The New England Patriots Dynasty and the Pursuit of Greatness said, “[Carl Williams] had met with agents, other sports insiders, and labor lawyers, just trying to figure out if there was a way to give his son some agency over his future employer. He told me in the lead up to the draft that Chicago is where quarterbacks go to die.”