It felt like Caleb Williams was more dialed in than ever during the game on Sunday against the Atlanta Falcons. The Chicago Bears quarterback never seemed out of control. This wasn’t the Houdini-like savant who could make up magic on the fly. He operated like a true professional, distributing the football and conducting the offense like an orchestra. This was not something people were used to seeing. It looked like the player everybody kept saying Williams couldn’t be.
Tom Brady and Kurt Warner both said it was the best overall performance of his career. He looked calm, collected, and poised in the pocket. How did it come about? The transformation feels so stark. Williams explained after the game that he was getting riled up by all the media talk about his injury and the Bears’ struggles. It was around that time that he watched the movie John Wick, an all-time action classic.
Williams loved Wick’s mentality throughout the movie: calm, composed, precise, and relentlessly efficient. He was so inspired that he reached out to Keanu Reeves himself. The actor is apparently a big fan of the quarterback and shared some inside information about Wick, the character.
Caleb Williams wanted to be like Wick: inevitable.
It doesn’t matter what you do or where you hide, the “Baba Yaga” will find you. Williams posted Wick as his profile picture in the week leading up to the game. People thought it was merely a message signaling that he was returning from his injury. Everybody remembers this iconic scene where Wick told his captors, after being asked for most of the runtime, that he was indeed back. Williams apparently wanted to re-enter the picture in the same fashion. Bringing only destruction to those who stood in his way.
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This is another reminder that Caleb Williams has an uncanny ability to find inspiration from almost anywhere. It can be a coach, a book, a newspaper headline, or a movie character. When he feels those juices flowing, it always translates to his play on the field. Those comparisons to Michael Jordan aren’t an accident. MJ was the same way. He’d constantly look for motivation wherever he could find it, even if he had to manufacture it himself. In this case, Williams used Wick and the national media’s coverage of his injury to light the fire.
The goal moving forward is obvious.
For Williams, nothing less than wearing a pristine suit to every game is acceptable. One must represent Wick properly. His next opportunity to claim a kill comes on Thursday night against the New England Patriots. They represent a far more challenging target, boasting both a top-10 quarterback and a top-10 defense. Then again, Wick never feared long odds. Williams doesn’t either. If anything, he loves it when the deck is stacked against him. That makes the games more fun.
A win would put Chicago at 5-2 on the season, with a long layoff until their next game in Seattle to face the defending champion Seahawks. Beating those two teams in back-to-back weeks would accomplish what Wick did when he killed that guy with a pencil. It would create a reputation. The Bears aren’t a team to overlook any longer. Williams has every intention of following through on that.
