Weekly Reading — 2026-08-16

Welcome back to my Sports Passion Project, where this post may start a firestorm, if I’m lucky.

I’ve made a pledge with my readers. I don’t talk about the present in the longform posts, unless something I find interesting happens. In the 2024 NFL season, this has resulted in me talking about the present just twice, once talking about how the Falcons tanking themselves out of the playoff race infuriated me, and once after week one, decrying that the league willingly uses bad players more than they ever used to.

I haven’t written a post about being good at football in the present since I wrote about Jordan Love in the 2023 playoffs, well over a year ago now. It’s typically just not what I do. I wait for good football to age a little bit, to allow more aspects of the story to become public knowledge, and then I’ll write about it. However, to talk about the 2024 Chiefs, their play on the field is all I need.

Did you know the KC Chiefs won 15 games in the 2024 season?

I know. With everybody talking about how much they’d fallen off for most of the season, it became quite easy to forget that they were still winning the games.

This constant focus on the negative, regardless of the actual results of the games, reminds me a lot of another team from recent history, the 2022 Minnesota Vikings, about whom I wrote another article, with the exact same title as this one, calling them the luckiest team in NFL history. That title was correct when I wrote it, but it’s not correct anymore. Their throne has been stolen. Their crown is now being worn by the 2024 KC Chiefs.

In the play tracking era, there have been just 16 teams to end a season with two losses or fewer. There are better and worse teams within this lofty group, but the 2024 Chiefs are by far the worst of them all, and I’m going to prove it to you.

Normally, to be a great team in the NFL, you have to be great at something. There are no parameters on what that thing has to be. You can be great at defence. You can be great at offence. You can be great at passing. You can be great at running, but there has to be something that you’re great at.

In addition, you have to be good at everything. In the NFL, there are six measurements for (non-special teams) play. Pass, rush and total offence, as well as pass, rush, and total defence. The rule of thumb to be a great team is that you have to be top ten in at least four of these categories, in addition to being top five in some of them. The more the better, but you can get away with four. Basically, this means that a great team has (at least) to be fantastic on offence, and have something to hang their hat on on the defensive side, or vice versa.

The 2024 Baltimore Ravens are a team that comes to mind. They are unequivocally a great team, but are in the top ten of only four of these six categories, being neither a top ten pass nor total defence. This is a team that won games based on their extraordinary offence, while at least having rush defence as something on that side to feel good about. They make up for the low amount of total categories by being in the top five in all of them, measured by EPA/Play.

So, who wants to take a guess as to how many categories in which the Chiefs finished in the top ten?

Three.

Rush defence, as well as pass and total offence.

These are not strong top tens either. It’s tenth in rush defence, ninth in total offence, and tenth in passing offence. The 2024 Chiefs are top five in nothing. They are great at nothing. This on its own means this team fails the smell test to me. They’re just not good at enough things, but let me show you how they stack up compared to everybody else who got as many wins as they did.

Here is every team that achieved two or fewer losses in a season in the last 25 years while finishing top five in no categories:

Only the 2024 Chiefs.

Here is every team that finished with two or fewer losses in a season in the last 25 years with a total defence ranking as bad as the 2024 Chiefs’ 15th place:

2010 Patriots, 2011 Packers, 2020 Chiefs, 2024 Chiefs.

At least we’ve picked up some company this time, but we’ve picked up company in the form of teams that have 2010 Tom Brady, 2011 Aaron Rodgers, and 2020 Patrick Mahomes, against all of whom 2024 Patrick Mahomes is not just outmatched but entirely hopeless. On the notion of offence, here is every team that’s finished with two or fewer losses in a season in the last 25 years with a total offence ranking as bad as the 2024 Chiefs' 9th place:

2003 Patriots, 2024 Chiefs.

What I’m getting at is you can still be this calibre of team allowing an elite offence to make up for a not 15-win-calibre defence. You can do it while allowing an elite defence to make up for an offence that is not 15-win-calibre. You cannot do it without an elite anything, but that is exactly what the Chiefs have just pulled off in 2024.

If I didn’t tell you what laundry the team was wearing, and I told you that a team with the league’s 15th ranked total offence, and ninth ranked total defence, just won 15 games in a season, you would say that’s impossible. There’s only so many points to go around. You cannot give up so many, score so few, and still have enough left over to have 15 different margins of victory. 385 points allowed subtract 326 points allowed is just 59 points to use to spread across every victory for an entire season. If we have to win 15 games, that’s an average of 3.93 points per victory.

That’s not possible.

Take for instance the 2024 Green Bay Packers, who I consider to be a standard 11 win football team. They had 122 points over their opponents, and spread them over 11 victories, for an average margin of victory of 11.1 points in the games they won. That’s slightly higher than average for an 11 win team, but not entirely atypical.

How in the world did the KC Chiefs manage to pull off a 15 win season, while barely even being able to outscore their opponents?

The answer is simple. One possession games.

One possession games are what these Chiefs did well. They are what they hung their hat on. One possession games are what they enjoyed doing. They are all these Chiefs had going for them. This is not a compliment by the way. One possession games are a bad thing. They allow your opponent close enough to be able to have luck swing the game their way, in a game where luck has a lot of power to swing things.

‘He’s great in one possession games’ is the type of backhanded compliment normally reserved for the likes of Kirk Cousins. It’s not supposed to be used when discussing the two time defending champions, but it is, and I’m going to use another list to tell you why.

Here is every team that achieved two or fewer losses in a season in the last 25 years that had to play 11 one possession games:

2024 Chiefs.

Alright. That’s embarrassing. How about ten games then? Surely with a bonus, some team has to join this list:

2024 Chiefs.

For goodness’ sake. Surely the 2024 Chiefs can’t be the only team that relied on a bit of one possession game luck to get to these lofty heights. How about nine games then?

2024 Lions, 2024 Chiefs.

It’s not until you get to eight one possession games in a season where you find quite a few companions in the two or less loss club. Those are the teams that got to the top with one possession game luck. The ones who played eight one possession games. Kansas City blows that out of the water with their 11. That does not just make what the Chiefs have done unprecedented. It also justifies the title. This is the luckiest team in NFL history.

The last time I talked about something like this, I talked about how the 2022 Vikings played 11 one possession games, and won all of them. I thought it would never be done again, but it’s taken just two seasons for that number to not just be matched, but one-upped.

Allow me to tell you the story of the greatest run of luck in NFL history, the 2024 Kansas City Chiefs.

At season’s beginning, it did not seem like it was going to be this way. Week one is a matchup between our KC Chiefs and the AFC’s best team in 2023 (and 2024, as it would turn out), the Baltimore Ravens, and it’s moments like these where I must insist that not every one possession game is the same. We beat the Ravens 27-20, and got within an eyelash of having to go to OT, but this is the acceptable brand of close game.

We spent almost the entire second half leading by multiple possessions, and the lowest our estimated Win Probability (according to NFLFastR) ever got in the second half was 67 percent. There was never any real danger of losing. We spent the whole second half far enough ahead that there was nothing luck could do to swing the tide of this battle. It tried. A lot of things went against us in the last ten minutes for this game to even be as close as it was, but the benefit of having a big lead is the privilege to squander most of it.

As is turns out, squandering leads is going to become a theme of this piece. Remember this Baltimore game for later, as from the future, we can see that coming within a toe’s width of blowing a two possession lead to Baltimore is not an isolated incident, but the beginning of the 2024 KC Chiefs forming the identity that they will carry with them the entire season. It’s not terribly important right now, but will become that way in retrospect, as the first of many blown leads for the 2024 Kansas City Chiefs.

In week one though, we don’t know that yet. All we know is we’ve just scored an impressive win over what is going to be one of the best teams in the conference again. That takes us to 1-0, and we move on to week two, where once again we get one of the AFC’s top dogs.

So we thought.

Week two is actually against the Cincinnati Bengals, a team who is going to boast one of the worst defences in all of football in 2024, and hadn’t been very good in 2023 either. This poor defence, combined with the game taking place in Kansas City, means we go into this game as full touchdown favourites, but as we’re soon to see, these Chiefs ought not to be favoured by so much.

This is a game that should’ve been a passing showcase, pitting the league’s 15th (KC) and 16th (CIN) ranked pass defences against one another, with both given the task to try to shut down one of the league’s best QBs, but as will become common in 2024 Chiefs games, the impossible occurs. Both teams have no trouble at all shutting down such elite opposition, even without the necessary defensive talent to do so.

It’s actually the KC rush offence that has to carry the day, operating at a 57 percent success rate (compared to Patrick Mahomes’ 38%). Despite this very solid day out of the rush offence, it’s just hard to win with your QB playing so badly, so we go into half behind 16-10, encountering our first of many second half deficits of the 2024 season.

It doesn’t last long, as the rush and the pass game split the load evenly (five successful plays each) en route to taking a 17-16 lead on the first drive of the second half, but this is where the offence sinks into the malaise. The Bengals immediately take a 22-17 lead back, and we cannot respond. Patrick Mahomes throws two INTs on the next drive. Only one of them is called back by a penalty, and that’s where we find the Chiefs’ lowest chance to win this game according to NFLFastR. 32 percent, with the Bengals possessing the ball, with a five point lead, on the first play of the fourth quarter.

Things will never get this good for Cincinnati again, as our defence comes up clutch, returning a strip sack for a TD and a 23-22 lead. They do take a 25-23 lead back, as we can’t find a single positive offensive play on our next drive either, and when Cincinnati possesses the ball on first and ten with seven minutes left and a two point lead, it’s beginning to look seriously bleak again.

Thankfully, we’re able to find a sack on Joe Burrow in the key moment, giving us the ball back for the final time, as while we’re still able to find just four successful offensive plays, that’s enough to get us into FG range, and we win this game 26-25.

That was a brutal second half of offence, and when I say brutal, I mean after the good looking drive to make it 17-16, there was not a single offensive play that generated positive EPA until the FG drive at the end, and even that drive featured just four of them on nine tries. This makes the Chiefs one of only six teams held to negative EPA by the Cincinnati Bengals all season, joining the inauspicious company of the New York Giants, Cleveland Browns (2x), Las Vegas Raiders, Tennessee Titans, and Pittsburgh Steelers.

Offensively, being compared to any of those teams is a nightmare, but it’s where the Chiefs belong in week two. Whatever the opposite of clutch is, that’s the adjective that describes our offence this game. We relied heavily on our defence, and they were there to pick up the slack, making us one of only five teams to hold the high flying Bengals to less than 0.05 EPA/Play (the vicinity of zero) all season, joining the Patriots, Giants, Browns, and Steelers.

Out of a defence that’s going to finish the season ranked 15th against the pass, it would not be wise to rely on them for this kind of performance again, but I don’t think the Chiefs get that memo, because a very similar thing happens the very next week, on the road in Atlanta.

We enter the second half trailing 14-13, struggling mightily to score against an Atlanta Falcon team that’s going to finish the season ranked 20th in total defence. Not that much better than Cincinnati. Just like against Cincinnati, we come out of the half hot, scoring two quick ones to make the score 22-14, scoring our last touchdown at 1:21 remaining in the third quarter.

Again like Cincinnati, our offence suddenly, and without warning, turns from white hot to ice cold. For the final 16:21 of the game, there are two successful offensive plays in total, and not a single first down, giving Kirk Cousins not one, not two, but three chances to eliminate our one possession lead. He’s normally great at this kind of thing, but not today.

We do reach our lowest second half estimated Win Probability of 56 percent, with Kirk Cousins possessing the ball on our six yard line behind by five points at 5:32 of the fourth, but he can get no further, turning the ball over on downs, and not getting that close a second time. By the skin of the teeth, our defence has bailed out our frozen fourth quarter offence for the second week in a row, and we move to 3-0.

In retrospect, week four is a very important game for us. It’s on the road against the division rival Los Angeles Chargers, who are a team that everybody loves to laugh at, but a team we would find out over the 2024 season is not one you want to surrender the division lead to. They’re not to be taken lightly.

Their defence is not a pushover like Cincinnati or Atlanta. They’re going to finish fifth in EPA/Play Allowed this season. It doesn’t seem like the optimal opponent to get our poor second half offence turned around, but in this case, it doesn’t seem like we’re going to have to worry about the second half.

Our first half offence is even worse.

We fall behind 10-0 in the second quarter, as prior to the 54 yard TD pass to Xavier Worthy at 4:14, there had been eight total successful offensive plays in the whole first half, on 21 tries. A 38.1 percent first half success rate is not acceptable, as even though the Chargers were awful on offence in the early season, they’re better than this. We can’t manage anything after this 54 yard touchdown pass either, so we go into the second half trailing for the third week in a row, this time 10-7, with all of our offence for the entire game having come on one play.

We know how this game finishes, but pretend you don’t. This is an iffy spot. With the benefit of hindsight, the Chargers are a pretty good team, and the AFC West is a pretty good division in 2024. It’s not like the AFC West that the Chiefs have known for most of the last decade, where a divisional loss or two is okay here and there. Divisional losses are not something we can afford to take in 2024.

Knowing how our offence came up so small in the key moments against such innocuous defences as Cincinnati and Atlanta, what can we possibly expect them to do against the mighty Los Angeles Chargers? It’s got to be better than its been in this next half, elsewise we’re going to fall to second place in the AFC West for the first time in years.

It does not start well, having to rely on a missed Charger FG to keep the score 10-7 by the time we touch the ball, and beginning the half with one successful play (a third down bailout) in five tries to bring our offence to bleak looking third and 11 situation.

On this third and 11, Patrick throws a very nice ball deep down the middle to Justin Watson. Nothing else comes of this drive, but this play on its own is enough to ensure a FG, and a game tied at ten. The Chargers get to our three yard line but turn the ball over on downs. We can’t do anything either, but LA has nothing for this voracious fourth quarter defence. They don’t get anywhere near scoring, as we engineer our first legitimately good looking fourth quarter drive of the season to sneak out of Los Angeles with a 17-10 win.

When I began the writing process on this article, I expected a lot of Patrick Mahomes fourth quarter wizardry. Instead, I’m faced with a pass offence that has a 50% success rate on the dot in the fourth quarter through the last three weeks, almost all of which comes in this Los Angeles game. There’s nothing wrong with 50%. In fact, that’s what strikes me about it. How ordinary it is.

The 2024 Chiefs are going to be a 50% success rate pass offence all season, in all situations. They do not improve in the fourth quarter. At least they haven’t yet.

Taking into account the Chiefs’ lowest second half estimated WP in all these games (67 percent against Baltimore, 32 percent against Cincinnati, 56 percent against Atlanta, 46 percent against Los Angeles before they missed the FG), that leaves an average of 50.25%, meaning the Chiefs should have likely won exactly half of these games, a typical result when all four of them were decided by one possession. Instead, we’ve won all four.

I’m off to a great start in proving the titular hypothesis.

What doesn’t help prove my hypothesis is the next two games, where the Chiefs defeat a Saints team that was off to an extremely hot start by the score of 26-13, and defeat the sinking but not yet sunk SF 49ers on the road by a score of 28-18. Both of these were fantastic performances out of our second half offence to turn what would’ve been dodgy games in weeks 2-4 into multi-possession wins in weeks 5-7. This was a very impressive stretch. If only this team could’ve had more games like this, there would’ve been no article with this title.

Another game that belongs to this good stretch in spirit is week eight on the road in Las Vegas. This is the right type of one possession game again. In the end, it’s decided by the score of 27-20, but there is no second half deficit. Gardner Minshew does not get three different chances to tie the game like Kirk Cousins got. He gets one, which ends in two plays when he gets strip sacked, and the game is over from there. The Chiefs’ estimated WP never gets lower than 66 percent in the second half.

These are the type of games that Chiefs fans love to talk about, which is why I’m getting so granular about which types of one possession games are flukes, and which are not. So far, there have been five of them. Baltimore and Las Vegas were well under control for almost their whole duration. Cincinnati, Atlanta, and Los Angeles legitimately could’ve gone either way. I generally say that teams should win approximately 50 percent of their one possession games, but this is only an aggregate, like I aggregated it to 50.25% earlier. Not every game is a 50/50 if the score is eight points or narrower. Those are just the bad ones, and for week nine, on Monday Night Football against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, we have to step back into the realm of the bad one possession games.

Both offences struggle to score for the first half, moving us past the halftime break with the score 10-7 in favour of Kansas City. However, Tampa makes mincemeat of our second half KC defence, immediately moving the score to 14-10, and giving us yet another second half deficit to deal with.

This is our fourth second half deficit of the season, which may not seem like much, but for a team undefeated through seven games this is a ridiculous number. Teams who finish seasons with two losses or fewer are known to finish whole seasons with four or fewer second half deficits. This is just game eight, and we’re already on our fourth one.

Our offence did not come out of the locker room as hot as the Bucs’ did, so we go three and out, punting the ball back to Tampa Bay. Our defence is struggling with their top five offence. The first play of their new drive immediately gets them to our 41 yard line. The defence does force them into a third and 12 from this position, but a 15 yard catch and run to Cade Otton really hurts, giving the Bucs first and ten from the 20 yard line, and ultimately the lowest chance of winning the Chiefs will face all night long, 40 percent.

Luckily, first down is an offensive facemask penalty, pushing Tampa all the way back to first and 25 at the 43. They do still manage a FG out of this, but disaster is averted. They will not find a spot that good again, as our offence finally wakes up, scoring back to back touchdowns to make the score 24-17 to our benefit. When Tampa again cannot score, that means we have the ball leading by seven points at 2:39 of the fourth quarter.

NFLFastR gives us a 96 percent chance to win from this position, as even if Tampa Bay gets the ball back, they will have no timeouts, and will have to go the length of the field against our defence, who is not easy to go down the field against in these fourth quarter moments. Even while the second half offence has let us down a few times this season already, the late game defence never has, and so right now, when the late game offence lets us down again, running only three offensive plays and giving the ball back to the Bucs, I’m still not that scared.

When the first play of the Tampa offensive touch is an offensive holding penalty, I’m really not scared. The Bucs get rolling from there though, but even when they get to first and ten on the 23, I’m still not scared. Our defence has faced this situation three times already in clutch situations, and we’ve lived to tell about it.

It’s only once I physically see the ball enter the end zone, and see the score board switch to displaying 24-23, that I know we have royally botched this game. It’s an even bigger insult when the Bucs elect to kick to make the score 24-24 instead of going for two points and the win, indicating that they believe they can beat us in an OT. You can’t fault their confidence, but in this instance it turns out to be a mistake.

A bad mistake.

This game goes into OT tied at 24. We win the coin toss, and Baker Mayfield never touches the ball again. Tampa fans are extremely unhappy about the choice to allow this game to go to OT instead of considering a two point try, as the Chiefs once again get out of Dodge, this time with a razor thin 30-24 overtime victory.

Royally botching an almost certain victory is not a flavour of one possession game we’ve seen out of these Chiefs prior to this, but we’ve seen it now, and we’re going to keep seeing it as the season rolls along. I told you after Baltimore that blowing leads would become a trend. This is where that trend really gets going. In this case, we were let off the hook by the Buccaneers’ overconfidence, or fear, or perhaps both, preventing them from attempting a two point conversion to attempt to win the game, but make no mistake. Frittering away a 96 percent chance to win and allowing the game to slip into a naked 50/50 overtime coin toss scenario is not what elite teams do.

Everybody has slip ups, but this was a bad slip. Not one becoming of a team with the status of two time defending NFL champions. In isolation, it could’ve been looked over, but combining this with all the other second half deficits the Chiefs have had this season makes this Tampa Bay game the point where all the noise around KC not being an elite team anymore really began to have substance for me. At this point, it’s becoming difficult not to notice that the Chiefs are not what they once were.

For reference, the best version of the Patrick Mahomes Chiefs (2022), played just eight games in a 17 game season where they allowed their opponents to stay within ten total EPA of them. That’s less than half of all games where the Chiefs failed to convincingly defeat their opponents. That is a great football team.

These Chiefs have played eight games so far, and have played seven games already decided by ten total EPA or less. Only in the Saints game (12.27 to -3.67) did the Chiefs truly convincingly defeat their opponents. In all the others, the game was within one big play of going the other way, and speaking of that, we’re about to get to perhaps the ultimate moment that the 2024 Chiefs will be remembered for. As far from a convincing win as one can get.

By the time week ten comes around, the Chiefs are not free and clear already, but we’re close. Three games ahead of the LA Chargers, and four ahead of Denver, we’re at the point now where we can afford one loss, so each game means a little bit less than it did just a few weeks ago, but each team always wants to defeat their division rivals, so this game against the hot new thing going on in Denver is a game both sides really want.

We come into it as eight point home favourites, but the bookies don’t know that the Denver Broncos are all set to get white hot after this. The Broncos will win each of their next four games after this one, not a single one by one possession, to truly break out of the pack and cement themselves as a team that will be making the playoffs in the AFC. They aren’t there yet as of week ten, but with how they play against us right now, perhaps we could’ve seen it coming.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Both offences struggle mightily throughout the bulk of the game, with Denver’s reluctance to throw their rookie QB into the Kansas City fire holding them back, and Denver’s number one defence holding us back. We manage two successful offensive plays in the first quarter, meanwhile the Broncos score on the second play of the second to take a 7-0 lead. We narrow the score to 7-3, but they immediately bomb a big completion on us to make it a 14-3 deficit.

We are able to narrow the score to 14-10 come halftime, but this is yet another second half deficit the 2024 KC Chiefs have to contend with. Beginning the half with a three and out does not help, nor does only being able to convert a first and goal opportunity into a FG and a 14-13 deficit. It’s once again that late game Chief defence holding down the fort, as despite scoring just six offensive points in the second half, not the type of performance you’d like when facing a four point halftime deficit, the Chiefs do have a 16-14 lead when the Broncos touch the ball for their final time, on account of our defence holding them to just three successful offensive plays in the entire half so far.

Much like the Tampa game last week, this does not feel like an especially dangerous situation. There’s six minutes left. Even if Denver does score, we can still get the ball back afterwards, and that’s if they can move the ball at all against this defence who has surrendered just two first downs in the whole second half.

Nevertheless, the Denver offence starts crawling down the field. Two yard run, six yard pass, six yard run, three yard pass, etc.. It’s the type of drive that’s awful in the first quarter, but fantastic in the fourth quarter. Our defence has three different chances to get them off the field on third down, but cannot convert any of them, and with the Broncos making sure to run the full 40 seconds off the clock at each opportunity, the final failure leaves us with our lowest chance of winning this game, 27 percent, with the Broncos possessing the ball on our 14, with enough downs remaining to run the clock down to zeroes.

It seems as if, for the second week in a row, the late game defence that’d been our calling card all season has failed us. Our chances of winning this game have been reduced to the chances of Wil Lutz missing this 35 yard FG attempt. There is no more time remaining for any kind of response. We have surrendered control of our destiny. All that can be done to continue our perfect season is to hope for a missed FG, something we have no control over.

Oh come on. You really believed that?

Being the team that we are, the 2024 Chiefs exercise the very last bit of control we have remaining. We block the FG attempt, converting on our 27 percent chance of victory, delaying the beginning of Denver’s hot streak for one week longer, and propelling ourselves to 9-0. This is the eighth game decided by ten total EPA or less (5.4 to 3.45), officially using as many close calls as the 2022 Chiefs used in their whole Super Bowl campaign, in just nine games.

We’re about to reach an inflection point in this 2024 Chiefs campaign, so I’m going to take this chance to summarise what happened in the undefeated portion of our season.

In the first ten weeks (nine games) of the 2024 NFL season, the Kansas City Chiefs faced five second half deficits, plus two additional games also decided by one possession, but never featuring the Chiefs trailing.

Taking the average of the second half win probabilities again, using the 67, 32, 56, 46, from before, in addition to the 66 percent from Las Vegas, 40 percent from Tampa, and 27 percent from Denver means I would expect the Chiefs to win 47.7 percent of these one possession games. If I give this team full credit for the two multi-possession wins, that’s still just 5.34 expected wins, which the Chiefs have turned into nine real ones.

That’s 3.66 wins above expected in just half a season.

The lion’s share of work towards becoming the luckiest team ever has already been done. For context, only three teams in the new millennium (2012 Colts, 2016 Raiders, and of course the 2022 Vikings) have scored 3.66 wins above expected or more in a whole season, according to my expected win model, so through just nine games this is already one of the luckiest NFL teams ever, and it’s still not over yet.

Before we get to the rest of it though, we have to talk about week 11 in Buffalo.

On the surface, it looks a lot like every other game these Chiefs have played all season, coming out of halftime facing a 16-14 deficit, but the Bills are different. They are not the Chargers. They are not the Falcons. They are not the Buccaneers. You cannot pull a Houdini act like the Chiefs have been pulling all season on them.

There are chances we get to swing this game, but we do not just fail on them. We miserably fail on them, not even getting close to scoring until we are already down two possessions, and it is too late. This is where the 2024 Chiefs and the 2022 Vikings (their closest comparison) differ. The 2022 Vikings never failed in any clutch spots all season long, but they were not good enough to stand up to the top teams, so the true top dogs just beat them in 40-10 type games, and did not have to worry about any of their clutch nonsense.

You cannot do that to these Chiefs. We’re too good for that, but we’re also not as clutch as the 2022 Vikings. The 2022 Vikings would’ve won this game 100 percent of the time. They basically did. They won one exactly like it against the Buffalo Bills in their season, but the Chiefs did not win it. We did not get close to winning it.

It’s a slap in the face of a realisation that we’re not ready for the top teams anymore. We can beat teams like the Falcons and Chargers this way, but when it comes to the Bills it’s just too much. Thankfully, we won’t have to face a true top team again for a while. Let’s get back to the fun stuff, like a week 12 matchup against the Carolina Panthers.

I don’t bet sports anymore, but when I saw the line was the Chiefs by 11, I audibly laughed and told all of my friends to go bet the Panthers to cover, and not to bet small. We do not beat anybody by 11 points. Not even the Panthers.

For most of this game, it doesn’t look too dangerous for KC. Far from a second half deficit, we enter the second half of this game with a 20-9 lead. It’s the good type of one possession game again. Carolina narrows it to 20-16, we pull back out to 27-16. At the beginning of the fourth quarter, they narrow it again to 27-19, and true to form, our offence goes to sleep.

In two tries to put the game away, we do not score. This leaves the Carolina Panthers to drive down the field and tie the game at 27 with 1:49 to go. This gets us to our lowest second half win probability, 75 percent. This seems low for a tied game in the fourth, but with the worst thing that can possibly happen being a 50/50 overtime, it’s not that unreasonable. We don’t get that far anyways, as a 33 yard Mahomes scramble is enough on its own to get us into FG range, and we take this one 30-27, but seriously?

A last second FG against the Carolina Panthers? What are we doing here?

It’s one thing not being able to convincingly defeat teams like the Chargers and Falcons. Also, in an underrated point, it can’t be denied that even though we were getting really lucky to win all those games, the average game on our schedule for the first nine was against a 9.18 expected win team. That’s a hard schedule. All of that falls away though, now that we’ve failed to convincingly defeat the 3-7 Carolina Panthers. We did not cover our 11 point spread. We couldn’t even cover a three point spread. All of this after falling well short in our game against Buffalo.

Despite the 10-1 record, things are not looking very good for KC, and somehow in week 13, they get even worse. Or should I say, they get even more Chiefs? On a Friday afternoon Thanksgiving weekend home game against the Las Vegas Raiders, everything goes brutally wrong, yet still somehow goes right.

Aidan O’Connell outplays Patrick Mahomes 0.14 EPA/Play to 0.06. We allow one of the worst rushing offences in NFL history in the 2024 Raiders to work at a 46 percent success rate against us. We cannot move the ball ourselves against a bottom half defence again, and we’re clearly the second best team on the field, against the damned Raiders.

It’s not so much this way in the first half, where neither team can move the ball effectively, but a missed Vegas FG helps us into the half with a 10-3 lead instead of a 10-6 one. To open up the second half, the Raiders march right down to our 30 yard line, but then the worst rush offence in recent memory comes back to bite them, and they fail on fourth and one there. We respond with one successful offensive play, but it’s a big one, so on its own it gets us a 13-3 lead.

The Raiders spend their next drive getting to our 22 with very little issue, but missing a FG again. We repeat pattern as well, responding with only one play that generates positive EPA, but it’s a 31 yard pass to DeAndre Hopkins, which nets three points and a 16-3 lead basically on its own. This is one of the most undeserved 13 point leads I’ve ever seen, with the Raiders having been inside the 30 twice, plus two additional FG attempts, all of which have netted three points combined.

This won’t continue.

At last, Vegas converts one of their good offensive drives into a score, cutting the lead to 16-10. We respond with nothing, and things are finally where they should be when a one play touchdown on the first play of the fourth quarter has us staring down the barrel of yet another second half deficit, 17-16.

That is yet another 95+ percent chance of victory that we have frittered away. That’s three of those in the last five games, along with Tampa Bay and Carolina. We can’t just have blowouts. We have to have these fourth quarter wars instead. It’s yet another one that we win, as we spend our three remaining touches on a FG and two three and outs, meanwhile the Raiders get inside our 40 yard line twice more, but again convert neither of these opportunities into any points.

That’s a 19-17 win for us, but this is the definition of unsustainable. Playing against the 2-9 Las Vegas Raiders this way is very very far from the level at which the Chiefs are accustomed to being. We’ve just lost the total EPA battle 4.76 to 2.92, but three missed Raider FGs, plus two Raider turnovers, all inside our 40 yard line, get us out of this never ending nightmare of a football game with a two point victory.

Nobody came up clutch in this game. Certainly not the offence, who scored nine second half points against a Raider team who’d given up 20 second half points to Bo Nix just last week. No offence to Bo Nix, but he shouldn’t be outperforming the KC Chiefs’ offence at anything. The defence didn’t hold up their end either, as the Raiders generated positive EPA just five times all season. Even with all the nonsense inside our 40 yard line, this game is one of them. Las Vegas won the total EPA battle in a game just four times all season. This game is one of them.

This is a level of competition that should not be troubling the KC Chiefs, but they are, because the Chiefs are not what the Chiefs used to be. Sometime between 2022 and now, there has been a structural break, where we went from being one of the NFL’s top dogs to relying on games like this to defeat the Las Vegas Raiders. Nevertheless, we did, and we move to week 14 at 11-1.

By this point, everybody’s gotten the picture with the Chiefs. They know what we are. This is demonstrated by the point spread for week 14’s game at home against Los Angeles. In week four, we traveled across the country to play in their home, and we did it as eight point favourites. Now, we play at home as mere five point favourites. If we net out the approximate three point boost that a home team gets, that’s 11 point favourites in week four, and just two points now.

That’s a nine point difference, against the exact same Los Angeles Chargers. That amounts to a dramatic loss of respect for the KC Chiefs over the course of this season, but with how everything has gone, can you honestly say it’s undeserved? We can barely beat the Carolina Panthers and Las Vegas Raiders. What are we supposed to do against a real team, like Los Angeles?

Well, how about the same thing we’ve been doing all season?

It’s a punt fest for the whole first half. The Chargers never get near scoring. We score 13 points, and going into halftime with a 13-0 lead, it looks just for a second like we’re about to actually beat somebody (as opposed to barely squeaking past them) for once. We’re coming out for the second half with a 93 percent estimated WP. All we have to do is maintain. Although we’ve been faltering for the last few weeks, we’re generally pretty good at maintaining. We don’t have to win another half. We just have to not lose it spectacularly.

These Chiefs are getting into quite the habit of spectacularly blowing leads.

Touchdown Chargers. Three and out. Touchdown Chargers.

Our estimated WP did not get all the way up to 95 percent, but it got up to 94, so I’m changing the filter, so I can say that this is the third week in a row that the Chiefs have allowed a 94 percent chance of victory or higher to become either a second half tie or deficit. All we had to do was coast. Now we’re down 14-13.

When did the Chiefs become such chokers?

I hate using that word, for reasons that have nothing to do with the Kansas City Chiefs or football in general, but I will use it in this circumstance, because what other word do you expect me to use? This is the fourth time in the last six games that this team has taken an almost unlosable situation, and found a way to put ourselves into a losing position.

Thankfully for us, the world at large only cares to notice how big of a choker you are when you actually lose, as the final three drives of this game go FG Chiefs, FG Chargers, FG Chiefs, and we win the game 19-17 again, but good God. This team is going to give me a heart attack if they cannot figure out how to hold on to a lead.

It’s not like these are electric offences either. We allowed the Buccaneers to come back on us. That’s perhaps forgivable, but we had the Carolina Panthers, Las Vegas Raiders, and Los Angeles Chargers all in practically hopeless situations. None of these teams are top ten offences. None of them are close to being top ten offences. Two of them are in fact bottom ten offences.

If we allow a comeback to Baker Mayfield, I will say okay. I’m glad to get the win. Don’t do it again, but if we allow a comeback to Bryce Young, Aidan O’Connell, or Justin Herbert, especially in back to back to back games, I will say there are serious structural issues. For people who thought this was an elite team throughout the season, this is the type of thing people like me were screaming about.

This is a team that can’t get a lead. They can’t hold a lead even when they do get a lead. They play close against good teams. They play close against bad teams. They allow comebacks to good offences. They allow comebacks to bad offences. All of this, but they have just one loss. At this point, week 14 of the 2024 NFL season, I found myself prepared to call this the luckiest team in NFL history.

Think about it.

They are 12-1 yes, but they’ve played ten one possession games, winning all of them, and they don’t seem to discriminate between good and bad competition as to whether they play a one score game or not. Who does that remind you of?

Ding ding. You’re correct. The 2022 Minnesota Vikings. The previous holders of the title of the luckiest football team in NFL history, but even the 2022 Vikings did not make it as hard on themselves as the Chiefs have. One more time averaging out the one possession game luck reveals that the Chiefs should’ve probably won 51.8 percent of these one possession games on average. Giving them no credit for the multi possession loss in Buffalo, but full credit for the multi possession wins, this reveals a rudimentary expected win total of 7.18 in 13 games.

Turning 7.18 expected wins into 12 real ones means the Chiefs have gotten 4.82 wins above expected in a 13 game stretch. The only team that lucky over the course of a whole year in the history of the league is those 2022 Vikings, and we’re closing in fast on their 5.07 2022 total.

The Chiefs do not cough up an unlosable situation for the fourth week in a row, defeating Cleveland fairly handily in week 15, but damn it if we don’t play one more one possession game against Houston in week 16. It’s the good type, but the Texans do possess the ball on our side of the field trailing by just one point in the second half, for the lowest probability of victory in the second half for us to get as low as 55%. This is all it takes to push us over the edge.

With an expected winning percentage of 52.1% in our 11 one possession games, and four multi possession wins, this gives the 2024 Chiefs 9.73 expected wins, compared to 15 real ones, for a wins over expected total of 5.27, becoming just the second team in NFL history with a score higher than five, and barely edging out the 2022 Minnesota Vikings for the title of the new luckiest team in the history of football.

I want to be clear with everybody that while I’ve been comparing the two a lot, the 2024 Chiefs and 2022 Vikings are not similar. This is not a team that was clutch, like the 2022 Minnesota team. That team was just not good enough to be beating the teams they were beating, and relied on clutch factor to bail themselves out of late game situations that their relatively low (7.92 expected win) team quality got them into, because they were not good enough to break away.

These Chiefs are not that. There are several games where they could have been free and clear (Baltimore, Las Vegas 2x, Tampa Bay, Carolina, Los Angeles the second time, Houston), but instead allowed their opponents to reel them back in, allowing multi possession leads to fall into one possession second half leads in all these games, and deficits in a lot of the cases.

That is not clutch. That is a team continuously putting themselves into bad situations, but still having the guile to work their way out of it. That is the opposite of clutch. Clutch teams (and players) do not create their own bad situations. Clutch would be these Chiefs scoring some extra touchdowns in some third quarters along the way to not face a second half sweat at all. That’s what clutch is. That’s not what this is.

The conclusion that I’ve come to while telling this story is that these Chiefs are not just not clutch, but in fact one of the least clutch teams I’ve ever seen. They constantly showed they were good enough to create good circumstance after good circumstance after good circumstance for themselves, and consistently threw those good circumstances away, often having to rely on one possession game luck (OT coin toss here, missed field goal there) to win games they could have won easily.

These Chiefs were like the Baltimore Ravens in the 2012 Super Bowl (almost blowing it after the lights went out, but their 22 point lead barely being enough to get them through the second half) every week of the year.

It’s not like this ended once the playoffs began either. In the Texans game, the Chiefs took an early ten point lead, and squandered it, instead spending almost the entire second half up by just eight points, before finally pulling out a bit further distance. This is the right kind of close game. Their lowest WP in the second half was 69 percent, but one nonetheless that did not have to happen.

The AFC Championship against Buffalo is the exact same story. An early 21-10 lead allowed to turn into a 22-21 second half deficit, and with Buffalo touching the ball while ahead in the fourth quarter in KC territory, the estimated WP got as low as 36 percent at one point, down from a height of 88 earlier in the game.

That is the 2024 Chiefs’ story. Choking. Just without the losing.

I wish I could say the Super Bowl’s outcome surprised me, but I don’t make a habit of lying to my audience and I won’t start now. Those who pay attention to my Notes (I don’t talk about the present on the mothership) would know that I predicted that the Chiefs would have no trouble containing Saquon Barkley, but still would lose handily. That’s exactly what happened, so I cannot feign surprise.

There was a part of me that hoped that KC would take an early lead before it all fell apart, because that would be a nice narrative ending to this story that I’ve told here, but it’s not negotiable that for a team like the 2024 Chiefs, it always falls apart eventually. There is only one team that is in the top 50 luckiest teams in history, and is also a Super Bowl champion. That team is the 2003 New England Patriots, and it’s literally a meme on this publication how much I talk about the 2003 AFC (take a shot, I brought it up), trying to explain that away.

Unless you are exactly the 2003 New England Patriots, you cannot win a championship this way.

I understand where all the hype about this team came from. If this Kansas City team could just stop shooting their own toes, they would be a great team again, but they just never quite got there. They never quite learned how to hold a lead, which is weird, because you wouldn’t have thought at season’s beginning that the Chiefs were a team that would fall victim to constantly blowing leads, given where they’ve been, but every NFL team is different. The 2024 Chiefs are not the 2023 or 2022 Chiefs. They came with an entirely different character.

For whatever reason, this particular iteration of the Chiefs was stuck with this bad habit. It never truly bit them, as in the end, both of their two true losses were against teams nakedly better than them, who both ran away with quiet multi possession wins over them. Being a 9.73 expected win team fighting with the giants will almost always end badly for the little guy. This is no different, and is in fact exemplary of the experience that typically comes with rooting for an underdog.

For a cross-sport analogy, these 2024 Chiefs remind me greatly of the 2022 Tampa Bay Lightning, a team who went on a fantastic Cinderella playoff run, before falling short at the hands of a far superior Colorado Avalanche team. They will never get proper credit for this underdog run, because of the little detail that they were the two time defending Stanley Cup champions. The 2024 Chiefs are just the same.

They were going against the very best teams in the NFL, hitting well above their roster’s weight. Unfortunately in sports, the playoffs are where good stories go to die. For all of us who are fans of teams that are not the Chiefs, it feels good to let KC fans back in on this reality. They knew it plenty well already, but have been exempt from it for a while. A nice reminder that the playoffs are beholden to nobody is always good.

We should have been cheering loudly for this Cinderella team who just kept winning football games, but we weren’t cheering. This should have been the lovable underdog that we’d remember for years to come, but they weren’t an underdog. What were the 2024 KC Chiefs?

They were the luckiest team in the history of the NFL.

Thanks so much for reading.

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Highlight reels failed to capture his signature move as a professional quarterback. Cameras weren’t flashing and sycophants weren’t hyperventilating. But, yes, Caleb Williams was able to master one signature move as a rookie last season.

In college, he’d juke and spin and escape helpless defenders with hypnotic flair. He was an artist coloring outside the lines and this 53 1/3-yard wide, 120-yard long field was his personal canvas. But in the pros, such sorcery was scarce. In the pros, he’s been escaping a different setting with remarkable precision and consistency.

The most dramatic spectacle of them all occurred on Dec. 26. His team was hosting the Seattle Seahawks on Thursday Night Football. Commercials rolled during a timeout, so nobody at home saw this poignant moment that perfectly summarized the 2024 Chicago Bears. In the wake of two firings, heartbreaking defeats, staggering to the finish line of an agonizing 5-12 season, interim head coach Thomas Brown tried to explain something to his starting quarterback and… no. Williams was not having it.

An auto-response kicked in.

As he had done many times to many coaches all season, Williams turned his head and walked away. Shane Waldron, before getting fired as offensive coordinator, used to stay quiet. Not Brown. Not a stern, blunt, old-school coach who believed this 22-year-old crossed a line of disrespect. The typically calm coach lost it. On the headset, another Bears assistant coach recalls Brown pressing the mic to finish his conversation: “Get your ass back here right now! Don’t fucking walk away when I’m talking to you!”

Unfazed, Williams sashayed away. Right back to the huddle.

The Bears lost, 6-3.

“That’s when you knew the world was coming to an end,” one coach says.

He pauses. He thinks back. The world might’ve ended that day, but in truth? All warning signs were obvious seven months prior. Outside the walls of Halas Hall, hype reigned. Tickets sold in record numbers when the Bears made Williams the No. 1 overall pick. No. 18 jerseys flew off the shelves. This glitzy gazelle in the open field was universally extolled as the charismatic, electric, dare we say Mahomesian playmaker these Bears have lacked since inception in 1919. OTAs arrived, coaches unwrapped this gift from the football gods who’ve cursed this organization for so long and… yikes.

Williams struggled to execute elementary tasks. Every day was a new disaster.

That early, that spring, the Bears changed the snap count to appease Williams. Instead of using a combination of colors and numbers like every other team in the NFL, the Bears reverted to a “Ready, set, go!” straight out of JV football because that’s what the quarterback requested. Aside from the obvious on-field consequences — defenders could tee off — the Bears were establishing a troubling precedent in allowing a rookie to tell them exactly what to do. Veterans couldn’t believe it. “Are you shitting me?” one receiver asked a coach.

When a play call was sent in, he’d stare at this wristband for a painful length of time. “Like it was in another language,” another coach says. 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. Verbiage was truncated. Huddling was minimized. The playbook, dumbed down. The Bears offense devolved into an exercise of trial and error to fit whatever the USC rookie demanded.

All of which would’ve been manageable if Williams was willing to work. He was not.

For all the talk about wanting to be great, this new quarterback didn’t seem to have the desire. When he wasn’t storming away from a coach, he was telling veteran wide receivers how to run their routes before taking a game rep himself. In the meeting room, he barely said a word and didn’t pay attention. Coaches often caught Williams on the wrong page of the gameplan completely. He blew off film sessions and lifts.

Chicago made him a captain.

Games began.

Chaos reigned.

The 2025 NFL season is here and these Chicago Bears are the most mesmerizing team of them all. Hope’s been restored with the union of a captivating quarterback (Williams) and a brilliant offensive mind (Ben Johnson). In free agency, the Bears rebuilt their offensive line. In the draft, they added weaponry. All offseason, it’s been drilled into your cranium that a bunch of dolts stunted the quarterback’s growth last season. Poor coaching ruining young quarterbacks is a tale old as time. Williams, so the prevailing storyline goes, is finally free. Thus, it’s now time for Chicago to rocket-launch into NFL contention.

When Go Long started phoning sources, this was honestly the direction I expected to trek. We’ve chronicled skeletons past in Chicago and explored the new duo. Yet, if we’ve learned anything since launching our longform site in 2020, it’s that there’s always a shady underbelly to the NFL that too often goes ignored. Life was, indeed, miserable in Chicago last season. But not for the reasons you think.

Williams was more source of turmoil, than victim.

And as always, the stench runs deeper than one person. The Chicago Bears possessed the most treasured asset in all of pro sports — the No. 1 overall pick in a QB-rich NFL Draft — yet proved again to be their own worst enemy.

For this three-part series, Go Long chatted with 32 sources. Coaches, scouts, execs, players and staffers inside Halas Hall guide readers through the sludge. Many have landed new jobs. To share their experiences without fear of retribution they’re granted a condition of anonymity.

The more we dig, the more it’s clear why the Bears have one winning season since 2012.

• In Part I, we reveal how 2024 spiraled out of control through the eyes of those coaches. A season that included extreme frustrations, a near benching, a late-season revelation and mass firings. “A shitshow,” one says.

• In Part II, we revisit the farce of a draft process that led GM Ryan Poles to select Williams No. 1 overall. One personnel man recalls the charade as “rigged.”

• In Part III, we zoom out: Who’s to blame? The Bears have become an organization repellent to independent thought. The GM inherited a bad situation and managed to make it worse with a 15-36 record. All roads in this league tend to lead back to ownership.

Ben Johnson and his staff now stare down the barrel of more disorder than they anticipated.

The quarterback he inherits is not the same species of football junkie.

Former Bears coaches cannot grin and bear it.

No doubt, part of the job is taking bullets for your players. But when one of those players, in their estimation, so blatantly lies about how he’s been coached? They feel no choice but to shed light on what transpired behind closed doors. In Seth Wickersham’s upcoming book, American Kings, Williams told his father that he wasn’t getting any help from the staff. “No one tells me what to watch,” the QB said. “I just turn it on.” When this quote went viral, I was actually on the phone with one former Bears offensive assistant.

He read it aloud, seethed and called it “evil” on Williams’ part to describe last season in such a manner.

“Do you think we’re not going to meet with this kid and teach him shit?” the coach said. “Who would do that? It’s fucking crazy. I don’t get it. You think we want to be bad? It makes me fucking sick.”

Another coach on offense calls Williams’ complaint “bullshit.”

“For him to say it?” the coach adds. “That guy knows what the hell happened.”

Another coach says this entire staff didn’t merely show up in Chicago and forget how to coach. All have prepared players their entire lives. All have been around top quarterbacks before, and this player’s work ethic was the worst most had ever seen.

“Any narrative surrounding that film — if people buy into it — I have some beachfront property in Idaho I want to sell ‘em, too.”

He continues.

“There are grown-man responsibilities. You expect him to put the work in. And I think everybody desires to be great. Wanting to be great is phenomenal. If I go to a local barbershop, there are probably seven guys who wanted to be great players when they were 13 years old. But what you want and what you earn are two different things. This life and the game of football doesn’t give you what you want. I want $50 million. If I want $50 million, I’ve got to go earn $50 million.

“If you can’t sacrifice? There’s no substitute for the work. That’s something he needs to learn.”

Red flags were immediate.

Life only got worse. And worse.

He rarely ever turned the tablet on. That was obvious. The Bears can see how much all players watch film on their devices away from the facility.

Which begs one question: How exactly did the quarterback spend his idle time?

One Bears coach sneers.

“That’s a good question for John Jackson The Third.”

The best place to start is with a player most NFL fans have never heard of in their lives.

Jackson was not amongst the 257 players selected in the 2024 NFL Draft, nor was he even one of the 15 or so UDFA free agent signings each team scoops up those manic hours afterward. Mainly because he’s not a talented football player. The wide receiver caught five passes in four seasons at USC, before totaling a meager 267 receiving yards his final collegiate season on a 2-10 Nevada team. He scored zero touchdowns in 51 games. The good news for Jackson was that his best friend is Williams, and the Bears’ GM was determined to keep his new quarterback smiling.

After participating at rookie camp on a tryout basis, Jackson was given a spot on the 90-man roster and then ate up a practice-squad spot all season long.

When I ask a GM for another team if Jackson was on his radar — at any point — he laughs, then assures it is not normal for a team to stash a quarterback’s buddy on the practice squad.

Bears coaches saw a receiver with no business being in the NFL.

“We all knew why this dude was on the team,” says one coach. “Couldn’t play a lick. And I like the dude. But that’s the lengths they did to kiss Caleb’s ass.

“We kissed his ass from Day 1.”

One coach is so irritated by the mention of this name that he refuses to touch the subject in fear of saying something he’d regret.

Hence, the fine line between building an infrastructure that helps a young pro flourish and outright pampering that player. This small nuisance symbolized a systemic problem. The Bears were willing to twist and contort at every conceivable angle to coddle its No. 1 pick. Throughout the entire draft process, roles flipped. Williams wasn’t interviewing for the Bears, rather the Bears were trying to convince Williams to say “yes” at the altar.

An ass-backward dynamic that spilled right into the actual football once the helmets came on.

On Day 1, Caleb Williams did not present himself as one of the guys eager to learn.

This looked like a kid whose reps asked teams about the possibility of receiving an ownership stake. (“He comes in here,” says one former Bears staffer, “acting like he’s a fucking movie star.”)

One coach who was around Williams a ton last season concedes it’s unfair for any rookie to glide into the league with “Peyton Manning”-level expectations. But this is also the most intellectually taxing position in sports. The only way any quarterback has a shot at pursuing greatness is if they’re “developed” and “molded” and — too often? — he sees prodigious 22- and 23-year-olds crowned by organizations. They’re given too much power.

Labeled a savior in the press. Treated like a savior in real life.

“Obviously if you’re the No. 1 pick, you’re a talented football player,” this coach says. “You probably haven’t had to work your ass off in every aspect of your entire life to be really, really good at football. The degree of separation in this league is not: ‘I ran around San Jose State and threw five touchdowns.’ We won’t play San Jose State. Those cats don’t exist. And so, the mental game that goes on behind the scenes at the quarterback position is huge. Especially the importance of habits. Habits are hard to break whether they’re good or bad.

“He’s super talented but talent by itself? Nobody cares in this league how talented you are.”

Very quickly, all parties involved realized Williams’ immense raw talent would not be enough.

Chicago’s mistake was allowing his worst habits to fester.

That’s why the staff is so floored by his accusation. If anything? They did too much.

A few wins at the end of the ’23 season helped Matt Eberflus save his job and Shane Waldron won the Great Offensive Coordinator Sweepstakes as the man to coach Williams. A process Poles took immense pride in, and why not? Back then, Waldron — a McVay disciple — was one of the hottest names on the coaching market. The Bears’ new staff was ecstatic to marry this Heisman talent with a sophisticated scheme that worked so well for the likes of Jared Goff in Los Angeles and both Russell Wilson and Geno Smith in Seattle.

Williams was not a fan. Williams won.

Almost immediately, the Bears castrated their own playbook.

“What plays we were calling,” one coach says. “How we were calling ‘em. Game planning. Not being able to run plays with alerts and cans and be able to have a run called one way and change it to the other way based on certain leverages of safeties and movements and stuff. He hated all that stuff.

“Everything had to fit what he wanted and what he was comfortable doing. Caleb wanted all this control of the offense, but really couldn't handle it.”

The Bears made their offense as basic as possible with easier formations, fewer motions, limited audibles. Smart centers typically take a mental load off of a rookie quarterback’s pre-snap plate but those centers cannot always see what’s brewing in the secondary — if, say, a safety creeps to the other side and morphs into an unblocked tackler. Williams was unable to keep up with these moving chess pieces. He didn’t realize he needed to motion a receiver over to pick that safety, or flip the run call to the other side.

Endless screw-ups forced the Bears to drastically dwindle their volume of checks.

Up front, Bears offensive line coach Chris Morgan was on McVay’s staff with the Washington Redskins back to 2012, worked with Kyle Shanahan’s NFC-champion Atlanta Falcons in 2016, and his Chicago teams rushed for more yards (5,413) than anyone in the NFL through the 2022 and 2023 seasons that preceded Williams’ arrival. His run scheme, however, requires a level of intelligence and diligence from the quarterback.

“Caleb didn’t want to do it,” one coach says. “Or couldn’t do it.”

Piecing together a functional drive became an “uphill battle all the time.”

Defenses roared off the ball thanks to that predictable snap count and the quarterback’s own sloppy habits. Sometimes, he’d simply stare… and stare… and stare at the defense’s structure. Other times, he’d flash his hands right before the ball was snapped — a split-second tell that served as a starter’s gun for pass rushers foaming at the mouth. On the headset, Morgan would lose his mind: “We’ve got to change the fucking cadence!”

Coaches deleted words out of the play calls. That didn’t help. Coaches tried going no-huddle to limit the number of times Williams would need to regurgitate those play calls. This wasn’t sustainable. All while a convoy of assistants nursed the rookie in every way imaginable. In earsplitting unison, they insist they’ve never seen a quarterback receive more help than Caleb Williams.

He was, in fact, taught exactly how to watch NFL film.

“They were babysitting sessions,” says one coach, “as far as walking through the process of how to study film, what to look at, whatever.”

Williams spent so many hours with both Waldron and quarterbacks coach Kerry Joseph that one person on staff thought the Bears might’ve even been breaking CBA rules.

The objective was clear: Make this offense as Caleb-friendly as possible.

“Shane went overboard in trying to help him,” says one Bears assistant who watched closely. “Shane tried to, well, ‘This is what they did at USC.’ In my mind, I’m looking at it, ‘It’s the NFL. Who gives a shit what they did at USC?’ He was bending over backwards trying to figure out the best way to reach him.

“Shane tried. Shane, I thought he went too far to try.”

No wonder one of the ex-OC’s closest friends in the business says Williams claims are still eating him up inside. Any suggestion that the Bears abandoned the rookie is at such odds with reality that, to them, it hints at a bigger problem: an absence of character. The opportunity to go the extra mile at home was quite literally in Williams’ palms. He’d receive three blitz tapes each week from the O-Line coaches. Each week, Joseph spent seven hours straight splicing up cut-ups: down and distances, third downs, two-minute, red zone, etc. “Wasting seven hours,” one colleague adds. “It obviously wasn’t watched.”

In Washington, No. 2 pick Jayden Daniels developed habits of his own by showing up to work at 5:30 a.m. each morning.

In Chicago, nobody recalls seeing Williams show up remotely that early. Extra film sessions were always budgeted into the schedule, too. Centers and quarterbacks congregated for a pass-protection meeting in the AM. Technically, they were optional. But the only player who blew them off was the player who obviously needed them most: Williams. He was a no-show, one source notes, “numerous times.”

He skipped lifting sessions. When strength coaches tried giving the QB new times to show up, he supplied excuses why he couldn’t make it.

“Talking about being great and being great are two different things,” says one coach. “I don’t care what you say. I care what you do.”

Adds another: “Ask Tyson Bagent if we coached the quarterbacks.”

Whenever he was physically present, Williams rarely engaged. One player in the offensive meeting room recalls assistant offensive line coach Jason Houghtaling starting meetings with a gentle reminder: “Everybody is responsible for this protection. Everybody has to lock in. Everybody has to work together. Everybody has to be on their shit. Not just some people.” It was his gentle way of trying to get Williams to give a shit. Because whenever Houghtaling — any Bears coach for that matter — directly asked the quarterback questions, he had no answers. Crickets. He was in La La Land.

“He’d give you the look, like ‘Why are you talking to me?’” recalls one coach. “Well, you’re the starting quarterback. That’s why. He wasn’t answering questions. It was strange.”

Bagent, the No. 2 QB, did supply the answers. Repeatedly.

One coach brings up the visual of Williams sobbing uncontrollably in his mother’s arms after a 52-42 loss to Washington in college. To him, this was damning because of what you don’t see on the screen. When the going got tough — when emotions overwhelmed — Williams ditched everyone who sacrificed alongside him that night: his teammates. “It’s always somebody else’s fault,” this coach says. Right down to body language. Veteran receiver D.J. Moore snapped at his quarterback once on this front, telling Williams flat-out: “We don’t do that shit.”

If Williams didn’t like a coach’s teaching point, he was liable to strut away in a huff. This started early, in training camp, and lingered into the season. Specific examples are shared. Nobody was off limits, but Waldron was easily iced out the most. Quieter and non-confrontational, Waldron never wanted to escalate the situation.

Practices. Games. The setting never mattered. Williams acted as if he was above correction.

“He didn’t want to hear anything,” one coach says. “He didn’t like criticism, so he’d just fucking get up and leave. We’d be like, ‘This motherfucker.’ Get up and leave! I would see this guy storming off and hear them talking in the headset about Caleb. You look over, and there’s Caleb fucking walking away all pouty. Then, he would sit all the way on the other side of the benches.

“So disrespectful. But Shane didn’t want to cause an even worse scene.”

The best teams in the NFL, of course, police themselves.

Leaders sniff this out. Step in.

One of the team’s assistant coaches, who had a strong sense of the locker room, never saw a genuine connection between Williams and teammates. It was weird. The same players who were pissed off by the quarterback’s immaturity were too afraid to address the problem to Williams’ face. They’d complain about the rookie behind his back. Often, for good reason. They knew Williams wouldn’t listen to a word they had to say. Coaches and players both call Williams “abrasive.” Not in an aggressive way. (He’s not aggressive — “at all,” emphasizes one coach.) Rather, he’s portrayed as petulant. Sour.

All while Williams had no problem telling veteran wide receivers like Keenan Allen and Moore how to run their routes before taking one NFL snap himself. (That didn’t go over well.)

September closed in and Williams was named one of the Bears’ eight captains. News that was celebrated by the team as evidence the rookie had ingratiated himself to teammates. Uh… not exactly. Multiple coaches admit to Go Long that the team cooked the voting process to ensure a “C” was stitched on his chest. One assistant even laughs at the suggestion that players would anoint Williams one of their captains. It was obvious to everyone that Williams was not an alpha male. When the rookie captain was asked to break down the entire team, it caught him off-guard. He didn’t know what to say. His delivery was so awkward the Bears stopped asking Williams to do it. Nobody understood how a No. 1 pick could be such a mute during practice.

“He tried to portray himself as an alpha and he definitely was not an alpha in any type of situation,” one ex-Bears coach says. “It was forced leadership. Everything was a charade. There was nothing authentic.”

One of Williams’ perceived strengths out of USC — galvanizing teammates— is described en masse by Bears sources as a weakness. One veteran player who liked Williams as a person admits his body language and leadership were awful. The best gauge for any quarterback’s leadership is what those 300-pound offensive linemen think. On this front, there were many issues.

All of it created a poisonous tonic for NFL Sundays. Call of Duty sprees may seem innocent enough but those bloody three hours on Sunday are inevitable — QB1s coast at their own peril. Lions head coach Dan Campbell hit the bull’s eye when he called this league an unstoppable “freight train.” That’s why Friday and Saturday are typically flawless dress rehearsals ‘round the NFL. By then, everyone’s locked in.

On the field, the ball never touches the grass. Off it, the QB has every answer to the test.

Here, both days were disturbing omens.

“Ask anybody,” one coach says. “We had the worst Friday practices in the history of the NFL every Friday. Those are supposed to be perfect. We’d come off the field and you’re like, ‘Whoa.’ There’s all kinds of issues. Messy. People know where they’re supposed to go, but the call is not right. He’s not accurate. The tempo is bad. We’re back in the huddle because he didn’t get the call right. That started early and never improved.”

Onto Saturday, as Chicago’s offense reviewed plays on the call sheet, coaches would take a look at Williams and see that he was looking at the wrong part of the sheet or a different page completely.

Discombobulation predictably reigned. Coaches knew their 4-2 start to the season was a mirage, and the dam broke in spectacular fashion.

Ahead of a showdown with the Washington Commanders — a homecoming for their quarterback — Williams told people during warmups his stomach was sick. Many weren’t buying it. The rookie who said on “Hard Knocks” that he never gets nervous appeared visibly shaken. Williams started 4 of 16 and the Bears went scoreless on their first seven drives. (“All of a sudden you’re sick?’” says a coach. “I saw that coming before when we took warmups.”)

Williams snapped out of his funk and completed a few clutch throws to give Chicago a 15-12 lead with 25 seconds left. One 22-yard beauty to Moore before getting walloped by linebacker Bobby Wagner was damn impressive.

You know the rest.

Daniels launched a 52-yard Hail Mary to win it.

Williams pursed his lips and stormed off in disgust, only pausing to shout something vulgar toward the defense on the field.

If the team’s foundation was “chipped,” as one coach says, this play “shattered it” completely. When teammates eventually saw the viral video of cornerback Tyrique Stevenson taunting a Commanders fan during the play, they were livid. “They wanted to fucking murder him,” one coach recalls. “I would expect nothing less from him.” Stevenson apologized in a team meeting, but it was too late. Nobody wanted to hear it. The Bears never recovered.

Next, they were drilled by the Arizona Cardinals, 29-9. (“A car crash,” one coach says.) That week, Poles stressed patience. The GM told his scouts that Williams’ path would be “different,” that he was not a 2- or 3-star quarterback who worked his way up. He’d need to get his bachelor’s degree before his masters, Poles noted, and rely on the talent around him.

Chicago was then humiliated by the New England Patriots, 19-3. (“It was fucking embarrassing.”) That day, Williams went 16 of 30 for 120 yards, was sacked nine times and the Bears went 1 of 14 on third down — their worst mark since 2012. All against a team that had the worst record in the NFL. Boos at Soldier Field got loud. Fans chanted “Fire Flus!” Morale drained. Any relationship between Williams and Waldron cratered beyond repair. One video caught Williams shaking his head and rolling his eyes at the OC. He refused to sit by Waldron much of the game.

This is when the internal blame game intensified. Between plays — on the headset — coaches could hear Waldron sending plays in with time to spare on the play clock. But as Williams stepped into the huddle, he’d stare as his wristband for an extra four, five, six seconds and the other 10 players assumed the coordinator was taking his sweet time. After all, those 10 can’t hear what Williams hears.

“That’s what started everything,” one coach says. “That was the disaster. That’s what got everybody pissed off, and that was the start of the division between the coaches and the players — the finger pointing.”

Right around then is also when word leaked in the locker room that Williams was squandering his free time playing video games. Teammates were pissed. Tight end Marcedes Lewis, the 40-year-old leader of the room, spoke up.

All parties involved knew something needed to change.

And even the players could now see that part of the problem was the first overall pick.

The next 48 hours defined Chicago’s season.

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Finally, months past due, the Chicago Bears decided to get tough with their rookie quarterback. When coaches reconvened Monday morning after their repulsive loss to the Patriots, head coach Matt Eberflus informed his staff they’d hold Caleb Williams accountable by giving him a dose of competition in the form of Tyson Bagent. The split wouldn’t be 50/50, but the Bears plotted to work Bagent in with the starters more to make Williams earn those starts on Sunday.

For too long, back to the spring, the Bears gave the USC wunderkind everything. It backfired.

There was some talk about moving Waldron up to the booth but Eberflus assured that nobody was going to be fired.

A move from Caleb to Bagent might’ve shocked fans, but not those who witnessed how both operate day to day. The 2023 UDFA out of tiny Shepherd College, the son of an arm-wrestling champ who had no problems whatsoever regurgitating the team’s most complex play calls, mastered all checks in this offense and could sling it in his own right. If the objective was to win, a switch made total sense.

“Awesome kid. Awesome. I love him,” says one ex-Bears assistant. “He knew everything. He knew how to function. He was in and out of the huddle. His cadence was great. He could tell you every answer to every protection question out there and every run question. Tyson Bagent’s a great one.”

Most telling, there were many players who supported a move to Bagent. As everything got worse and worse — and the Bears dropped to 4-5 — a growing number started to look at each other and ask, “When are we going to make a change?” Initially, one offensive coach pointed to the vets Moore and Lewis as “ringleaders” who wanted Williams benched. But they were not alone. Another coach on offense states there were far more than two players advocating for a quarterback swap and that the players’ message was absolutely conveyed to Poles.

Says another coach: “Those players wanted to bench Caleb the week after the New England game. The players were the ones wanting him out after the New England game before Shane got fired.”

All parties involved seemed to agree that the best thing for Williams was a wake-up call.

All parties, that is, except Poles and the front office.

On Tuesday AM, Eberflus called another staff meeting to inform everyone that Waldron was fired and assistant Thomas Brown would be promoted to OC. There also would be no Bagent sightings. Poles made it abundantly clear to all that Williams was the team’s undisputed, unambiguous starter. “The scalp he gave them,” a front-office source adds, “was Shane Waldron.”

All of which amounted to damning whiplash for the organization, a Butkus-like clothesline into the mud. Here were the Bears, fully prepared to give a quarterback who’s heard Yes his entire life a valuable lesson in No. This league’s 104-year history is teeming with stories of 22- and 23-year-olds who needed a crash landing to rock bottom. The No. 1 pick one year prior, Carolina’s Bryce Young, was benched and learned from the experience. Hall of Famers John Elway, Terry Bradshaw, Drew Brees and Troy Aikman were all benched for various reasons early in their careers.

In Chicago, there were no such cojones. Powers that be chose to spoil Williams. Coaches understand why any GM for any team would veto the benching of a No. 1 overall pick. Doing so is the ultimate self-own in sports. The problem here is that Poles never seemed interested in having harsh conversations that’d benefit Williams in the long term.

The big, bad media served as a frightening boogeyman.

“I’m amazed by people in leadership positions who avoid confrontation,” says one of the Bears assistant coaches. “You can’t avoid confrontation. It’s important to be strategic with how you have confrontation. There’s a right way and the wrong way to do that. But problems are problems. And they don’t solve themselves. It was more about the media outrage. Ryan was worried about standing at the podium and answering questions about why that happened, which I don’t think is that difficult.”

Instead, it was Williams who stood at the podium that week and a few of Waldron’s colleagues were irked by his nonchalance. They believed he gently side-stepped accountability to gently paint himself as a victim of circumstance. The same rookie who’d often skip lifts was downright bubbly inside the weight room, too. Dapping people up, one source recalls him acting like this was the happiest day of his life. Adds one coach: “This fucker didn’t take any accountability for anything and threw people under the bus.” Then again, Williams had good reason to celebrate. His alliance with Poles packed more punch than any rapport he could’ve established with any coach.

Everyone knew there was nothing they could say to persuade Poles to sit his quarterback.

These 48 hours were an inflection point.

“What are you going to do?” says one coach. “He is the golden boy.”

Next came back-to-back-to-back crushing last-second defeats to all three NFC North teams. Williams was dynamite vs. Brian Flores’ Minnesota Vikings defense in a 30-27 overtime loss, throwing for 340 yards and two touchdowns. A dash of hope extinguished four days later under the Thanksgiving spotlight at Ford Field. All of America had its fun laughing at Eberflus bungle this game away against the Detroit Lions. Taking a timeout with you into the locker room is a Grade-A coaching crime. When Williams was sacked at the Lions’ 41-yard line — 32 seconds left, down 23-20 — Eberflus could’ve saved the rookie from himself by calling a timeout to regroup.

Slide a headset over your ears, however, and you’ll see there’s more to the story.

The play call is relayed promptly with Williams told to run a QB draw (the same play as before) and then call a timeout. The game clock bleeds from 30 seconds… to 20 seconds… to 15 seconds. The mic cuts out and Williams ditches the draw for a deep shot to Rome Odunze. (“He’s going to snap it, right?!” Eberflus says on the headset.) On the sideline, Bears players and coaches demonstrably spin their hands to compel their quarterback to do so.

Finally, with five seconds left, Williams snaps the ball and throws a deep incompletion to Odunze.

Coaches believe Williams panicked and assumed this was the last play of the game.

“That’s why he let the clock run,” says one coach. “He’s thinking, ‘OK, we need to throw it towards the end zone.’ … It’s not like Flus is an idiot. That couldn’t be further from what happened. That’s part of being the coach. We all accept that, but there’s a lot more to it than, ‘Hey, why didn’t this dude call timeout?’”

Adds another: “I don’t even know what he’s thinking, but he basically makes it into the last play of the game and throws up a gimmie ball.”

And another: “He fucked up. But he’s not going to get blamed for it.”

Afterward, Williams said he was hesitant to call a timeout himself after doing so earlier in the drive. Also long forgotten was a play with 46 seconds left, when Williams short-armed a wide-open Moore on a crossing route that would’ve resulted in a touchdown. Inside the locker room, vet cornerback Jaylon Johnson went ballistic. The thermostat on Eberflus’ seat cranked to volcanic.

In Washington, the team that completed a Hail Mary on Oct. 27 was on a rampage toward the NFC Championship Game with their rookie quarterback.

In Chicago, the two men running both the offense and the defense were both terminated with five games still to play. Eberflus became the first coach in Bears’ century-plus history to get fired midseason, officially putting this season on life support. Survivors could only shake their heads at an organization caving to public pressure. Everything spamming Twitter, shouted on the radio and written in newspapers directly fueled the day-to-day operations.

“An unwinnable scenario,” says one coach. “No different than decisions around benching the quarterback and having to deal with the media outlash vs. what’s best for the football team, when you decide to fire coaches within season and also give the same person more responsibilities, they don’t give a shit about what it takes to be a really good football coach. You don’t just fire both coordinators in-season — and one of ‘em happens to be the head coach — and expect to have positive results.

“At that point, I don’t think they really cared about winning. It’s more about having a response that the media accepts.”

Once he’s finished cursing Caleb Williams for the 17th or 18th time, this coach who’s been around some of the best quarterbacks of this generation laughs, and laughs, and laughs a little more. He knows it’s no accident that Williams pinpointed “Shane Waldron” — and not “Thomas Brown” — as the coach who did him dirty in multiple reports that’ve trickled to the public.

“He knows Thomas will beat his ass,” the coach says. “He knows better than to name Thomas’ name.”

Eberflus is described by former assistants as a very pleasant man. Albeit, a little dorky. Waldron is similarly docile. Brown, on the contrary, is old school. Brown promised to bring a completely different coaching style to Williams those final five weeks. Odds are, Williams never experienced anything quite like this his entire football life. In a team meeting, Brown minced zero words. Without calling out players by name, he asked everyone why they were so afraid to hold Williams accountable when the Bears do it with everyone else on the roster. If the right tackle botches a combination block, the tight end speaks up because it directly affects the success of the play. If players think the quarterback is doing something wrong, he implored, tell him.

Quarterback may be the most important position in the sport, he explained, but it’s not untouchable. In fact, the opposite is true. Caleb was the handpicked savior of the franchise, thus Caleb needed to be held to a higher standard.

Brown tried like hell to inject a novel dose of accountability and professionalism into the most vital employee of an $8.8 billion company.

“When it changed,” one coach in that team meeting recalls, “everybody was like, ‘Oh, good. Now he’s going to be a little bit stricter. That’s what we need.’ Until he was strict on Caleb, and then Caleb didn’t want any part of it. He didn’t want to deal with Thomas. Every team meeting, Thomas was on everybody’s ass. He wasn’t putting up with anybody’s shit. Your typical hardnosed coach: ‘Now, we’re going to be physical. We’re going to whoop their ass. No fucking excuses. I don’t want to hear anything.’ Just how you think it would be — until guys started feeling like, ‘Oh, now he's picking on me.’”

It was a valiant effort.

It was all too little, too late.

The same issues chafed. During one routine walkthrough the night before Chicago’s rematch with Detroit, inside the team hotel, Williams flubbed four of the first eight play calls. The formation was backwards. Or he forgot to motion a player. Or he botched a shift. (“We were like, ‘Oh my gosh, we still can’t get this shit right,’” one coach recalls.)

Against the Lions’ decimated defense, Williams still managed to complete 26 of 40 passes for 334 yards and two TDs in a 34-17 loss. Not even the staunchest skeptics can deny Williams’ arm talent and Houdini escapability. Earlier this offseason, Go Long chatted at length with his private coach who illustrated a “perfect storm” brewing with the team’s new head coach. Will Hewlett has worked with Williams for years and defended his QB’s work ethic. “Caleb’s the type of guy you have to be like, ‘Dude, stop. We’re done. Get off the field.’ And then toughness, that dude is a tough son of a gun. … There’s never been a moment or a thought of ‘Is this kid going to be able to handle this?’”

That’s what’s so maddening. He can be wildly entertaining. He can create magic.

Despite everything, he threw 354 straight passes without an interception — a rookie record. It’s not as if the league’s MVP, Josh Allen, set defenses aflame as a rookie in 2018. He completed a meager 52 percent of his passes. Patrick Mahomes played all of 62 snaps. Joe Burrow went 2-7-1 and tore his ACL. Lions OC Ben Johnson saw enough in Williams that day at Solider Field to warm up to the Bears’ job and later raved about the quarterback’s electrifying skillset at his introductory press conference.

If only Johnson could’ve then heard what Bears coaches did on the headset four days later when the Bears hosted the Seattle Seahawks on TNF.

Those on the sideline will never forget the calm, cool ‘n collected Brown losing it on Williams during that slopfest.

Their aforementioned exchange was so heated that sources are surprised it was never leaked.

That same game also hinted at an underlying condition ailing the Bears all season. Not once, not twice, but three times, the Bears rehearsed their first offensive play the night before. Williams trots onto the field, play-by-play man Al Michaels praises the rookie’s 4:1 TD-to-INT ratio and you can see the quarterback closely reading the play call off his wristband. As he walks to the line, he stares at the wristband again, sticks his mouthpiece in and completely forgets to motion tight end Cole Kmet over to the right side.

Running back D’Andre Swift rams into a swarm of white jerseys for a two-yard gain.

“Caleb looks over to the sideline at Thomas,” one coach says, “like it’s Thomas’ fault.”

Sadly enough, this play on Dec. 26 gave a few coaches flashbacks to the first week of April. Back when Williams flew to Chicago on his only pre-draft visit. That early, coaches could sense that he’d struggle with basic huddle calls and forget to motion players. And it wasn’t until later — right around that second-to-last game of the season — that coaches say they learned their quarterback had a learning disability.

Multiple Bears sources tell Go Long they’ve seen evidence that Williams has dyslexia. They also believe that the GM, who has access to everything, was well aware of this condition before the Bears made the quarterback their first overall pick.

A learning disability does not have to be a deal-breaker, of course. Many highly successful pros are open about the condition. Packers pass rusher Rashan Gary owns it as his “My Cause My Cleats” initiative. Frank Gore rushed for 16,000 yards, the third-most in NFL history. Savants such as Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso and Magic Johnson revolutionized their respective fields with dyslexia. Yet rather than do what a normal NFL team would with such a gigantic decision — meticulously chart a plan — the Bears, coaches and scouts tell Go Long, either suppressed this information or overlooked it. At worst, it’s a cover up. At best, gross negligence.

Either way, the offensive coaches had zero clue.

Not during OTAs. Not during training camp. Not even as the losses mounted and pink slips flew.

Understandably, they were incensed.

One source says Brown confronted Poles late in the season to point out that this information would’ve been helpful months prior. Go Long was not able to contact Eberflus for this series, but assistants and scouts alike believe the head coach was kept in the dark. “There’s no way (Eberflus) wouldn’t tell Shane and those guys,” one coach says. “He doesn’t operate like that. He’s not going to risk getting fired not to tell Shane a big secret. What are we talking about? There’s no way.” Adds one source in the front office: “Poles is still running the organization. He should be in communication with the coordinators.”

The person in charge of handling such matters is the team clinician, one source says, and the team clinician (Carla Suber) determines how a player then works with coaches and teammates to function at an optimal level.

“We would’ve fucking coached him differently,” says one former offensive assistant, who believes Poles knew. “This is criminal. Withholding this shit? They should have been fired. They knew. The GM and them knew.”

Poles and Williams were not made available by the Bears for this series.

Coaches tried a million different things from May to January. But if everyone was on the same page, one coach posits they would’ve used pictures instead of a wristband. One says the teaching methods for everyone would’ve been different, right down to how they ask questions. Another coach notes that there’s more to dyslexia than simply “reinventing” the back part of a sentence. He cites cognitive and attention elements and different communication approaches. (“So that definitely would’ve been helpful to know before the draft.”) One ex-Bears coach says he worked for a dyslexic coordinator once who simply spelled out “left hash” and “right hash” on his call sheet, instead of trying to visually flip the call.

It's not hard to see how this could theoretically slip through the scouting cracks.

Williams was the first known prospect to ever skip medical evaluations at the NFL Combine, and then only visited one team: the Bears. Back then, nobody had a clue if Williams even wanted to play for the Bears. His camp was exploring ways to circumvent the draft itself. Several team sources we spoke to believe Poles protected this intel so he wouldn’t spook the quarterback. Silence that no doubt contributed to a 5-12 record.

And yet, when I ask each coach point-blank if they believe a learning disability or work habits affected Williams most, nobody hesitates.

“How big of an impact the disability has,” one coach says, “it’s hard to quantify that until everything else has been X’d out as far as preparing yourself the right way and working to put yourself in a position to be successful. Until the work ethic and the process is solidified it’s hard to say anything is worse than that.”

Another coach interpreted Williams staring at the wrong page of a gameplan during meetings as laziness. Not confusion.

“Everybody’s locked in on one thing,” he says, “and you’re sitting back looking at a completely different part. It’s hard to sit back and say, ‘Oh yeah, I was tuned in and those guys weren’t coaching me.’”

Adds one front-office source: “The learning disability, that’s not his fault. But he’s not putting in the work, either. He’s lazy.”

He didn’t loaf to JaMarcus Russell proportions, but he wasn’t exactly gathering receivers together for routes post-practice like the quarterback he replaced: Justin Fields. Backyard football, he learned, does not fly against professionals. And to coaches, Williams’ attitude through the spring and summer makes perfect sense. He’s the first collegiate superstar of the NIL era. He earned $10 million via partnerships with the likes of Dr. Pepper, Nissan, Wendy’s and United before playing one pro down. From the night Williams won the Heisman Trophy as an underclassman on, he was universally dubbed the slam-dunk, can’t-miss, Midas-Touch future No. 1 overall pick.

Red flags were uncovered along the way. But red flags were treated as minor annoyances, not topics worthy of vibrant debate because — by then? — the Bears were in full-fledged recruiting mode. The aim was to stay in the quarterback’s good graces.

“Everybody was kissing his ass to get him here,” says one coach. “So he’s thinking, ‘I ain’t got to listen to any of these guys. You should be kissing my ass.’ Because we were! Why would he change?”

This coach dubs Williams the the poster boy for everything wrong in today’s NIL world. Hate it. Love it. This is the new world order in college sports. Athletes should’ve been compensated for their services a long time ago but the wild-west nature of college football and the transfer portal has made it much more difficult to find players wired for the crucible that is professional football. These days, the best of the very best are surrounded by agents and yes-men early as 14 and 15 years old. Coaches know if they criticize one of their 5-stars — or, God forbid, bench him — they run the risk of that 5-star transferring.

In the NFL, there is no escape hatch. No cakewalk games.

Hardship is a guarantee.

College coaches are almost always less than honest when you hunt for the truth. Even then, the Bears coaches detected smoke when it comes to Williams’ relationships with teammates — one cites the “We a team!” video. USC players appeared to bond when their star quarterback skipped the bowl game. Further, how Williams put up those gaudy numbers was also concerning.

“You’re making miraculous plays,” says one coach, “but it’s unnecessary because you skipped three reads and had to spin around in a circle twice and juke some cat who you’re better than and you made a miraculous throw. That’s phenomenal. But in this league — more times than not — you’re going to get body-slammed. You’re not going to juke that dude who plays defensive end. He’s bigger, faster, stronger than you and doesn’t care about you being Caleb Williams.

“There were enough red flags and signs. We just didn’t address it early on. And the best time to fix the problem is right now. And the longer you allow it to fester, the harder it becomes to change.”

All while Williams walks down fashion runways, attends Louis Vuitton shows and poses in a slew of different outfits for an Esquire photoshoot. He paints his nails. He was voted GQ’s most stylish athlete. Quarterbacks need a life outside of X’s and O’s. Quarterbacks don’t need to eat avocado ice cream, wear recovery pajamas and obsess over the sport to a Tom Brady extreme.

Win games, and nobody will care. All eccentricities will be celebrated.

Lose games, and one Bears coach who got to know Williams closely believes this fashionista side could become “a point of contention and distraction.”

Even though Williams was held accountable inside Halas Hall those final five weeks, the national narrative outside the building sped 100 mph the other direction: Williams was “overcoming” coaching and “overcoming” the O-Line while getting sacked 68 times, the third-most in NFL history. Coaches have a sinking feeling the QB bought into everything he was hearing on ESPN. As Chicago limped to the finish line, they didn’t sense any sincere soul searching. Brown tried. One source in the building shares that Brown flatly told Williams that this 2024 season — in the public’s mind — was on the coaches. The coaches aren’t good enough for you. But next year? Once a new staff is hired? It’ll be on you, Caleb. One hundred percent.

Everyone loves a redemption story. Caleb Williams is salvageable.

If, coaches add, Williams admits what worked in college will not work in the pros. He says everything right at the podium, but now must back up the rhetoric with action.

As in, a total self-audit.

“He’s always blaming everybody — this dude’s a coach killer man,” one of his offensive coaches from ‘24 says. “I know how he treated other people, and that’s what makes me sick.”

Oddly enough, in D.C., nobody speaks about Jayden Daniels in such terms. Or Drake Maye in New England, Bo Nix in Denver, J.J. McCarthy in Minnesota and Michael Penix Jr. in Atlanta.

These Chicago Bears had their pick of any quarterback they desired in a loaded class.

Take a seat inside these draft meetings.

But, please. Don’t speak up.

If you’re not interested in Caleb Williams being the No. 1 pick, your opinion is not welcomed.

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As many of you know by now, Senator Dick Durbin penned a letter to Pam Bondi two days ago asking questions about information his office received from a protected whistleblower. The letter read, in part:

According to information my office received, Attorney General Bondi then pressured the FBI to put approximately 1,000 personnel in its Information Management Division (IMD), including the Record/Information Dissemination Section (RIDS), which handles all requests submitted by the public under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and Privacy Act, on 24-hour shifts to review approximately 100,000 Epstein-related records in order to produce more documents that could then be released on an arbitrarily short deadline. This effort, which reportedly took place from March 14 through the end of March, was haphazardly supplemented by hundreds of FBI New York Field Office personnel, many of whom lacked the expertise to identify statutorily-protected information regarding child victims and child witnesses or properly handle FOIA requests.

My office was told that these personnel were instructed to "flag" any records in which

President Trump was mentioned.

Despite tens of thousands of personnel hours reviewing and re-reviewing these Epstein-related records over the course of two weeks in March, it took DOJ more than three additional months to officially find there is "no incriminating 'client list," and the memorandum with this finding includes no mention of the whistleblower or additional documents, the existence of which Attorney General Bondi publicly claimed on February 27.

This letter was made public right after I had filed a FOIA request for all the Epstein and Maxwell Grand Jury testimony (see my last post on Substack.) When I saw that over one thousand people had been put to work reviewing the Epstein files, I put a call out on my BlueSky account:

In the 24 hours since, I’ve received several messages, including from a former analyst that was assigned to review the files, and a few things stood out to me.

First, approximately 1,000 personnel in the Information Management Division (IMD) and the FBI New York Field Office were assigned to this task, confirming the whistleblower account made to Senator Durbin’s office. I can also confirm that a log exists tracking the mentions of Donald Trump in the files, and that there were approximately 100,000 files containing roughly 300,000 pages. Individual analysts were told to flag mentions of Trump by document and page number by logging them in an Excel spreadsheet, then they’d hand in their spreadsheet at the end of their (sometimes 24 or even 48-hour) shift. But it’s important to note that the agents were not told to flag Trump until later in a process that began mid-March.

The process of reviewing the Epstein and Maxwell files was chaotic, and the orders were constantly changing - sometimes daily. One person I spoke to on the condition of anonymity said that many agents spent more time waiting for new instructions than they did processing files. But here’s what caught my attention: the files were stored on a shared drive that anyone in the division could access. Normally, access is only granted to those working on a project, but because of the hurried nature of the exercise, the usual permission restrictions were not in place. Additionally, the internal SharePoint site the bureau ended up using to distribute the files toward the end did not have the usual restricted permissions. This left the Epstein and Maxwell files open to viewing by a much larger group of people than previously thought.

Regarding the ever-changing nature of the instructions, which one source described as “full panic mode,” there were at least four different review instructions. Keeping in mind that the Record/Information Dissemination Section (RIDS) are trained in FOIA redactions but many in the IMD are not, there were multiple video training sessions that went out on an unclassified network on what to mark for redaction, what not to mark, and how to record things that needed to be flagged. That means that video exists of trainers explaining the process of flagging instances of Donald Trump appearing in the files, and those videos went out on unclassified networks within the bureau. It’s also of note that the trainers toward the end were folks from the Department of Justice, and not the FBI.

At first, the analysts were told to mark nothing. This was roundly rejected by the analysts, who were then told to not think about it as releasing the information - including victims names - to the public, but to think about it as releasing it to the Attorney General. It was assumed that Bondi and Patel wanted all the information, including the victim’s names and information. Analysts were told that what would be released would be solely up to Pam Bondi. Many feared that the victim’s information would be released or used for nefarious purposes. Eventually, lawyers from the Department of Justice were assigned to the project to oversee what was being flagged for redaction.

That changed pretty quickly and the analysts were next told to mark the victim’s names for redaction. Then soon after that, they were told to mark all other Personal Identifiable Information (PII) such as social security numbers and addresses. Then they were told to mark all descriptions of illicit acts for redaction. Then finally, they were instructed to keep a spreadsheet of instances when Trump was mentioned. After the spreadsheets of mentions of Trump were handed in, they were stitched together in one master list. I was not able to learn how many mentions of Donald Trump were on that master list.

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As far as content, there was one confirmed mention of Donald Trump in the files reviewed by an analyst who again spoke on the condition of anonymity. Beyond that, there were other instances of Trump appearing in the files, but the number of times and to what extent is unknown.

But the log exists.

Something else that stands out is the potential stress and possible trauma created by the review of the files. They included photos of yacht parties and photo shoots that some analysts weren’t prepared for. The photos accompanied victim testimony, and in one instance, Epstein had instructed a group of young girls, many safely assumed to be minors, to remove their clothes and pose nude on the beach. “It was the casual coercion of it that hit me,” one analyst said.

After the review was complete, the DoJ and FBI decided not to release anything. That surprised analysts who thought for sure that a scrubbed version of the files would be released. From March 14th until its completion, the analysts assigned to review the files at IMD were told not to leave the building - working long shifts under chaotic and ever-changing conditions with exposure to disturbing materials. They did end up letting some analysts go home for short periods of time, but then they’d be right back in the office reviewing files. Morale was abysmal.

But there is a log of instances Donald Trump is mentioned in the files, there are video and PDF trainings instructing analysts to flag Trump, there were multiple instances of Trump appearing in the files, Patel and Bondi wanted victim information and PII, and sloppiness means that more people than previously known had access to the Epstein and Maxwell files. And while there was no indication of a ready-made, A to Z client list beyond the little black book that’s already public, “to say there’s nothing or to say it’s a hoax? Bullshit.”

If you are one of the people who reviewed these files or took the training, please feel free to reach out to me on Signal at Muellershewrote.23; I will keep you anonymous. And while all my content is always free, I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber to support independent media.

~AG

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