Caleb Williams tell-all series might be true but it's too hard to say

"At the end of the day, this is our profession and Caleb understands that, being the pick that he is and where he is, so we'll take it all and we'll bang it for sure."

The newest criticism attempts to stir up the past, like Wickersham's book that no one cares about now except Monday night's ESPN crew.

Tyler Dunne, a former Packers reporter for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, wrote a series of stories and was critical of Williams. It is said to have 32 sources. Few, if any, are named. The website is Golongtd.com, the same one that annually has the Bob McGinn hit pieces on draft picks loaded with comments by unnamed scouts.

Maybe these guys just don't know the names.

Dunne's series, available through subscription, details some problems that went on in Williams' rookie year.  At least they seem like details but it's hard to say because no source is given in many cases.

"When a play call was sent in, he’d stare at this wristband for a painful length of time. Like it was another language," Dunne wrote that he was told about Williams by an unnamed source.

The chopping continues.

 "Williams verbalized the call in the huddle, it was wrong half the time, and then players would be lined up wrong all over the field," Dunne wrote

It's hard to prove Williams called the play wrong in the huddle half the time, which is an even 50%.

It's also difficult to believe 50% of calls in any professional football huddle could be wrong. If it's true, the McCaskeys already should be demanding their money back from Williams and also from all the offensive coaches from last year. If that's all the better you can do, then a good case for fraud sems like it could be made.

Without a source's name put to it, though, we are only left to accept what is essentially commentary by the writer as truth. Not good enough.

No doubt this type of thing probably did happen at times, because there have been complaints about the offense having obvious execution presnap issues, both last year and this year. Beyond that, no one can be certain it was 50% of the time, as the writer claims.

The story also says, without naming the source, that Williams was petulant and gave a description of shrugging off coaches. Dunne sold himself short here. He should have named the source because everyone already saw this in Williams’ body language. Ben Johnson already started off their relationship by lecturing about it. He did the same with DJ Moore. It all was the subject of an offseason press conference. Maybe the unnamed sources didn't hear about that.

"Verbiage was truncated. Huddling was minimized," Dunne wrote. "The playbook, dumbed down. The Bears offense devolved into an exercise of trial and error to fit whatever the USC rookie demanded."

All easy enough to believe and even reported in the past to some extent, but again, this has no sources attached. It's a gross generalization and oversimplification of what happened, but no source is given here so it's tough to tell truth from imagination.

There seems absolutely no doubt some of this did go on based on the naked eye and other reporting. But this potentially revealing story is done a disservice without sources named.

When GM Ryan Poles, himself, said short cuts were taken last year with Williams that should never have been taken, Dunne's story only seems to verify it.

Seems and did are two different things, though. It's just like the difference between having a source with a name on it and saying something that someone might allege for any number of reasons or even make something up entirely for whatever reason.

Another problem with the story: Other situations are cited with a coach involved and not only was the source unnamed, but neither was the coach named. It's like reporting, "Something happened with someone, I can't say who, but here's what it was. Believe me."

Wow.

Just like with Wickersham's book, that was then, if it even happened. This is now.

The emphasis with Ben Johnson has been on Williams learning it the right way from the beginning because those short cuts were taken.

An example: They're not using wristbands. They say they want the QBs envisioning the play in their heads and this doesn't happen with wristbands involved. They wanted true learning, not a QB who acts like he's learning and is looking at his wrist.

If Williams tried brushing off Johnson the way the story describes he did with the Shane Waldron/Thomas Brown tag team last year, he'd wind up watching Tyson Bagent start.

Anyone who has seen Bears practices on a daily basis and heard Johnson and his approach to teaching knows they're trying to get the basics down first. Everything else flows from there.

Right now Poles is in complete lock step contract-wise with Johnson. So, if some of the type of behavior by Williams that is reported by Dunne and his sources lacking names occurs again, there's little doubt who's going and who's staying.

The Bears could pick a quarterback in the 2026 draft to suit Johnson's desires.

Then, no doubt, we'll get the unnamed source version of it all in 2027 at Golong.com.