USC Trojans star quarterback Caleb Williams enters this new college football season hoping to win a National Championship. Most of all, he is also hoping to cash in big time and possibly win a Super Bowl with his NFL home. That will only happen on his terms.
But as the reigning Heisman Trophy winner goes through his final year in college, NFL teams are already looking ahead to next April. Williams is expected to be the first overall pick in the 2024 NFL Draft, but that is only if he actually submits to it.
He might decide to stay in school for another year, make NIL money, and see what happens in 2025.
Williams and his father are beginning to realize how much they do not like the Draft and how it plays out.
“I’ve always been able to choose the team that I’ve played on, and then everything’s been scheduled for me,” Williams told Sam Schube of GQ. “But now, going into this next part of my career, it’s weird [because] it’s so uncertain. You don’t know anything. You can’t control anything but you and how you act. That’s honestly the weirdest part for me, is the uncertainty.”
Williams is willing to stay in school if he doesn’t want to play for the team with the first pick in the draft.
“The funky thing about the NFL draft process is, he’d almost be better off not being drafted than being drafted first,” Carl Williams told Schube. “The system is completely backwards. . . . The way the system is constructed, you go to the worst possible situation. The worst possible team, the worst organization in the league — because of their desire for parity — gets the first pick. So it’s the gift and the curse.”
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Even if he were to stay in school, they would still face the same circumstance in 2025 with a team that is terrible from top to bottom. You can only run from it for so long.
Caleb Williams could pull an ELI Manning and very well tell the team with the No. 1 pick to not pick him.
“It was my decision having talked with my agent, coaches, [general managers] and owners,” Manning said previously. “Going through the draft process, I was just worried about the Chargers organization at the time. I felt it was the right decision and I had a little pull.”
Chargers drafted Manning but then traded him to the New York Giants. They received Philip Rivers, the Giants’ third-round pick in 2004 along with their first and fifth-round selections in the 2005 draft.
The Arizona Cardinals may find themselves in a similar situation in 2024 or even 2025, because the team is not expected to be very good for some time.
