Caleb Williams marches to a beat of a different drum than we have previously seen in professional quarterbacks, and is taking center stage in a culture war that has been raring in and out of sports for at least a decade.
On Monday, Williams, the former USC quarterback who is the presumptive top pick for the Bears in the upcoming NFL Draft, was in the audience at USC’s women’s basketball game versus Kansas, appearing to sport a pink wallet, phone, nails and lips.
Days later, USC director of player relations Gavin Morris posted a video on X, in which he asked Williams to see what his phone looks like.
“The wallet’s white, the phone is pink, the case is clear,” Williams said.
“What the fingernails look like?” Morris asked.
“Nails are clear,” Williams said, holding up his hand. “Lips are pink. Your girl love ’em.”
Williams spoke to former USC great Matt Leinart last October about why he painted his nails for every football game.
“It started, I would say, three years ago,” Williams said at the time. “It was my last year of high school. My mom does nails. Let’s just start it off there. She’s done it my whole life. It’s just kind of always been around me. Nobody else does it. I just kinda like to do new things.”
“You gotta keep your hands fresh,” Williams, the 2022 Heisman Trophy winner, continued. “This is where all the gold comes from.”
There have been a number of people who have wondered on social media, some in not a particularly nice tone, if Williams can be a leader of men in an NFL locker room as someone who has painted his nails, cried in his mother’s arms after a tough USC loss and wore a dress-like clothing garment in the pages of GQ.
There has also been a backlash to the backlash, as media figures such as Colin Cowherd, Kyle Brandt and Robert Griffin III have repudiated the idea that Williams’ nail painting will have any negative bearing on his performance as a professional quarterback.
“Let Caleb Williams be Caleb Williams. Ain’t nothing wrong with him wearing pink fingernail polish and having a pink phone case. Quite frankly, if he goes to Chicago then Bears fans should be rocking whatever he is. Stop the hate and accept him for who he is,” Griffin tweeted earlier this week.
Brandt decried “cavemen” who were going after Williams, and Cowherd opined that 95 percent of fans don’t care, zero percent of NFL general managers care and that the “media is giving oxygen to lonely people on Reddit boards.”
The good news is that this is a debate that can at least somewhat be adjudicated on the football field — if Williams balls out and leads the Bears to great success, there’s not much that anyone can say.
Of course, there’s also a big gray area in between, where if he doesn’t succeed there are plenty of other variables, such as the Bears’ longstanding failure to develop elite quarterbacks.
Regardless, expect there to be a lot of noise about Williams and the way he presents himself for the foreseeable future.
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