Chicago Bears fans hope new quarterback Caleb Williams will help the team capture an ever-elusive Super Bowl ring after arriving as the No. 1 overall pick in the 2024 NFL Draft. It turns out Williams already has a colorful history with rings, once breaking the wedding band of a high school coach with a high-velocity throw.
This was 2018, when Williams was a sophomore at Gonzaga College High School in Washington, D.C., still three years away from beginning his college career at Oklahoma. Halfway through a camp practice in nearby Pennsylvania, the school's offensive coordinator, Danny Schaechter, realized his ring finger was bleeding.
"I'm like, 'What the heck did I do?'" Schaechter told ESPN's Courtney Cronin. "And then I realized, 'Oh crap. My wedding ring is split in half.'" Not long beforehand, the then-16-year-old Williams had apparently "whipped a pass so hard," Cronin writes, "that it splintered the metal of Schaechter's ring and cut his finger."
"Because of Caleb, I take my wedding ring off anytime I'm going to go do some football stuff," Schaechter continued. "I don't want anybody to break my wedding ring, but he was the only one who actually did it."
It jibes with reports of Williams' vaunted arm strength, which ultimately helped him win the Heisman Trophy at USC and carried over into this year's pre-draft process. CBS Sports' scouting report indicates Williams "is as close to Patrick Mahomes as we've seen since 2017. His footwork looks cleaner in his drop back, he has a plus arm, throws with great accuracy to all three levels and consistently wins with his legs -- whether he's in the pocket, flushed from the pocket or on designed runs." Up next: a chance to translate those talents to Chicago in the NFL.
