Caleb Williams, the number-one pick in last year’s NFL draft, has almost blocked out the trauma of his rookie season. The Chicago Bears—the team for which he is the starting quarterback—finished at the very bottom of their division. After a promising 4–2 start, they lost ten games in a row. The head coach, Matt Eberflus, got fired in late November, the first time the Bears franchise had ever canned a coach mid-season. And Williams spent much of the year running for his life on the field: He was sacked a league-leading sixty-eight times.

For an athlete who’d carried the nickname “Superman” since high school, it was a cold dose of reality.

Nearly two months after the final snap, Williams still has trouble computing how much losing he had to endure. “I’ll be honest with you,” he tells me, “I’ve never lost this much. I lost ten games in one season. I think maybe eleven.”

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