Will Caleb Willams be the biggest story of the 2024 NFL season?

Every year in the NFL, there’s a handful of stories that grip the NFL world for the entire season. In 2023, breakout rookie quarterback CJ Stroud was one of them.

Will 2024 see yet another rookie quarterback define the season? ESPN thinks so, and that quarterback is Chicago Bears starter Caleb Williams.

This is what Dan Graziano, a senior NFL writer at ESPN, had to say about Williams’ situation in Chicago in 2024:

“The Bears do offer Williams perhaps the best situation into which a rookie quarterback has ever stepped, equipping him with two wide receivers (DJ Moore and Keenan Allen) who surpassed 1,000 yards last season and another (Rome Odunze) who led all FBS players in receiving yards in 2023 (1,640)… But how ready Williams is to take on this level of responsibility — and whether he can do something resembling what Stroud did in Houston last year — will have a lot to say about how Chicago feels about its team next spring.”

With great hype comes great expectations for Caleb Williams

We’ve heard this a lot already this offseason when discussing the Chicago Bears. While we don’t want to overload a rookie quarterback with impossible expectations, we do need to acknowledge the uniqueness of Williams’ situation, as Dan Graziano lays out for us. Some analysts want us to tap the brakes on the hype around Chicago. Others think we need to floor the accelerator.

No matter what happens, one thing is clear right now. The Chicago Bears will again be the center of conversation in the NFL. Whether those conversations are about Super Bowls in the near future or adding yet another name to Chicago’s QB graveyard depends almost entirely on how Caleb Williams handles the weight of expectations.