CHICAGO (WGN) — A skilled quarterback burdened by the dysfunction of his organization, doomed to toil in mediocrity for over a decade despite a high level of performance year in and year out. It’s a familiar tale to a neighbor in the NFC North, one that bodes a prophecy of pain if the Chicago Bears don’t correct course while Caleb Williams captains their ship.
While watching an utterly ugly Bears-versus-Seahawks game that ended in the same score as back-to-back White Sox-versus-Mariners games in July, the thought occurred to me.
Is this going to be the career arc of Matthew Stafford reborn in Chicago?
Football fans in Detroit and all across the NFC North should remember Stafford’s Lions days well, which were anything but consistent, and always chaotic.
The Lions selected Stafford with the first overall pick in the 2009 NFL Draft a year after they became the second team ever to go 0-16. He spent 12 years in Detroit and averaged 4,374 yards with 27 TD passes every 16 games on the way to earning AP Comeback Player of the Year honors in 2011, and a Pro Bowl nod in 2014.
Despite those numbers and accolades, Stafford had as many head coaches as he had winning seasons in Detroit — four (including interim head coach Darrell Bevell after Matt Patricia was fired midseason) — and three playoff appearances without a single postseason win.
Then, in the first year after being traded away to the Los Angeles Rams, Stafford led the Rams to a Super Bowl victory.
His teams’ shortcomings before arriving in Los Angeles weren’t due to any lack of effort on Stafford’s part, which was crystal clear from the get-go.
To this day, the longest continuously-running clip from NFL Films is of Stafford at the end of the Lions game versus the Cleveland Browns on Nov. 22, 2009.
In the grand scheme of the NFL, it was a meaningless matchup between the two most hapless franchises in football, but the heroics a rookie Stafford put on display in the span of four minutes and 17 seconds endeared him a love from Detroit that was as strong as the rocket launcher attached to his right shoulder.
He was a gunslinger. He was grit before Dan Campbell lionized the word and brought new meaning to Lions football. He was hope incarnate every year in Detroit because Lions fans knew, at the very least, they had a quarterback as talented as any in the league who would lay it all on the line every time he took the field and regardless of result, complained not once for 12 straight years.
Year one Caleb Williams is year one Matthew Stafford in more ways than one.
Both were the No. 1 quarterback prospect in the entire country coming out of high school. Both were No. 1 overall picks charged with reviving dysfunctional franchises. Both spent most of their rookie seasons scrambling around, buying time only to get killed by a massive defensive lineman, just like Stafford did on that November night 15-plus years ago, and Williams did at the end of the Seattle game Thursday.
Both suffered behind porous offensive lines, though Stafford was never sacked nearly as much as Williams has this season.
Through 16 games, Williams has been sacked 67 times, which is the most in the NFL this season, and nine away from tying David Carr’s rookie record of 76 set back in 2002.
Williams has been sacked 7-plus times in four games and 5-plus times in six games this season. According to The Athletic’s Kevin Fishbain, Williams’ four games of 7-plus sacks is the second-most of any player across their entire Bears career, trailing only Bobby Douglass, who had five such games in 61 contests for Chicago from 1969 to 1975.
In 12 years in Detroit, Stafford’s highest single season sack total was 47 in 2017, a year the Lions went 9-7 and made the playoffs behind 4,446 yards, 29 TD passes and 10 INT from Stafford. He was sacked 5-plus times on 18 occasions across his career in Detroit, which included two games where he was sacked 7-plus times twice; a 10-sack game in a 9-24 loss to the Minnesota Vikings on Nov. 4, 2018, and a 7-sack game in a 19-28 loss also against the Vikings on Oct. 25, 2015.
Both have plenty in common.
What Williams and Stafford don’t have in common is that the Bears have the opportunity to save him from countless years of turmoil by doing something the Lions never did while Stafford was in Detroit — assemble the right front office and hire the right head coach.
Whether it was under Matt Millen, Martin Mayhew or Bob Quinn in the front office, or Jim Schwartz, Jim Caldwell or Patricia along the sidelines, the Lions front office delivered enough talent to perform alongside Stafford, and Detroit’s coaching staff never developed a game plan that delivered playoff results.
It’s a storyline that’s already been written in Chicago’s recent history, minus having a consistent quarterback under center to endure it all.
Since George McCaskey took over as team chairman in 2011, they have hired three general managers (Phil Emery, Ryan Pace and Ryan Poles), six head coaches and had five different quarterbacks start at least six consecutive games (Jay Cutler, Mitchell Trubisky, Nick Foles, Justin Fields and Caleb Williams).
No matter how you cut the cake, a Bears general manager and head coach have never started a regime with the quarterback of their choosing and much less a roster around them that fosters consistent success.
It’s time for Chicago to correct course after 14 years of mediocrity (minus 2018). If they don’t, time will pass the Bears by and one day years from now, they will be the ones trading the best quarterback in the history of their franchise so he can accomplish what Chicago never helped him do — win a Super Bowl.
Just ask Lions fans what it’s like to watch that happen. The same possibility looms large for the Bears and Caleb Williams.