There are football games that end when the clock hits zero, and then there are the ones that linger, the kind that replays themselves uninvited while you’re brushing your teeth or staring at the ceiling at 2 a.m.
The kind that makes even seasoned veterans of the sport stop mid-thought and admit, “Yeah, that one got me.” For Cris Collinsworth, the Chicago night Caleb Williams turned chaos into something close to magic was very much the latter.
Cris Collinsworth Relives the Unreal Caleb Williams Experience
By the time Collinsworth was asked about it on the Day of Super Bowl Radio Row by PFSN, weeks had passed. The adrenaline was gone. The noise had settled. And still, the memory hadn’t faded. Not because it was clean or perfect (it wasn’t) but because it felt like the beginning of a story you already know you’re going to be telling for years.
“The easy thing to do is to look at it and go, all right, you expect something out of Caleb that we haven’t seen yet.”
That expectation has followed Williams all season, hovering somewhere between belief and impatience. The sense that something spectacular is coming, or has to come, even when the moment looks broken beyond repair.
“But it’s like, how many more times? And I go, come on, it can’t just keep happening. And then he started backpedalling and ran 30 yards backwards and turned around, and it was game on again. So there are some people that have that pixie dust, who have the ability to create something special.”
The Bears needed every ounce of it. In the Divisional Round against the Los Angeles Rams, Chicago looked like it was running out of time and answers. Instead, Williams found both. Calm, patient, and unbothered by the weight of the moment, he engineered a late comeback that tied the game.
With only 24 seconds left, Williams was back to the 40-yard line from the 14-yard line. And then came the exclamation point. He threw the ball toward the end zone to Cole Kmet on fourth-and-4.
Nevertheless, in the 20-17 loss, Williams finished 257 yards, two touchdowns, and three interceptions. For the contest, he received a 78.1 score on PFSN’s QBi.
Collinsworth sees Williams as part of a broader shift happening across the league. Young quarterbacks, Drake Maye, Sam Darnold, and Williams, are entering new systems and flashing the kinds of instincts that remind you why development is rarely linear.
