CALEB WILLIAMS WANTS EIGHT SUPER BOWL TITLES — AND IN CHICAGO, WHY NOT?

His language is unfamiliar at Halas Hall, where the Bears haven’t won since 1985 and lose like the city’s other teams, but the new quarterback vows to break Tom Brady’s record and play almost as long

     They are worth $6.3 billion, fifth in the NFL, because Chicago is their base. That is the only reason, akin to McDonald’s and its inability to make an eatable cheeseburger. Otherwise, the McCaskeys have added nothing to the Bears’ value except one Super Bowl championship in 1985. Even that trophy was an underachievement — a waste of football’s greatest defense, sport’s biggest drinkers, Mike Ditka’s equilibrium, Walter Payton’s will and the Fridge.

     It’s time for someone to enlighten this team about life.

     Caleb Williams works for me.

     If you haven’t noticed, he is speaking a language unfamiliar at Halas Hall. Playing the most significant position in all the events we watch — an absence prolonged laughably since Sid Luckman in the 1940s, which Jim McMahon helped when his body wasn’t askew — Williams already sounds grandiose about his goals. He was asked on “The Pivot” podcast, hosted by ESPN’s Ryan Clark, what he hopes to achieve.

     He brought up Tom Brady.

     Bigger, he wants to remain with the Bears almost as long and, yes, win more than seven league titles. When Tom is brought up in local scenarios, we think Waddle. The new quarterback wants the most resounding of all careers.

     “I want to play at one place for 20 years, and chase one guy — No. 12,” Williams said. “I want a place that loves ball. That’s all I’ve heard about Chicago so far."

     Isn’t that extraordinary bluster? Does he not understand the Bears are a dead end for people who throw the football? Kansas City takes Patrick Mahomes after the Bears take Mitchell Trubisky, among many blunders through time. Does Williams not realize he could be cursed, the way hexes have killed the Cubs and White Sox? Wouldn’t a quarterback going elsewhere, such as Jayden Daniels or Drake Maye or J.J. McCarthy, be better suited to winning at all — much less at Brady’s historic, balls-out rate?

     He doesn’t look at the world that way. “There’s no extra pressure added because I know who I am,” Williams said. “I know how hard I work. I know what I like. I know what I don't like. I know the people around me. You take the emotion out of it and you look at it from a different way and you deal with it that way.”

     Worrying about surpassing C.J. Stroud doesn’t bother him, either. Last year, general manager Ryan Poles chose to ignore him and traded out of the No. 1 overall selection, forcing him to watch a superb rookie season and a playoff victory. This time, he’ll take Williams with the pick. The tug of war begins Thursday night. ‘‘I want to do better (than Stroud). That’s my thing,” he said. “If the plan is for the Bears to draft me, the plan is to go as far as you can possibly go — all the way to February. If they draft me, my plan is to go work my ass off, get after it, get in the playbook really heavily and handle things the way things need to be handled.’’

     February? The Bears haven’t played in that month since 2007, in Miami, where Prince did the halftime show in a rainstorm when the game was unforgettable. They played the Indianapolis Colts, where Peyton Manning won his first title. Williams was five years old.

     What do you think he has done after the combine? That’s where he said, “I tend to create history and rewrite history,” and since then, Williams has been conversing with Poles about building an infrastructure. His offensive cast has become capable — receivers DJ Moore, Keenan Allen, Cole Kmet and Gerald Everett; backs D’Andre Swift and Khalil Herbert; and an improving line — while the defense is buoyed by the trade for Montez Sweat and the re-signing of Jaylon Johnson. Would Williams have followed his father’s 2023 claims and found another team if the Bears didn’t produce? Going the Eli Manning/John Elway route no longer is an option.

     Growing up in the nation’s capital and playing college ball at Oklahoma and USC, he has done homework on Chicago, the sports town. He knows what the Bears mean to the masses, who have been torn by two-team baseball losers and let down by the post-Jordan Bulls. He’ll miss Los Angeles, but he knows what winning with the Bears would mean for his legacy. “LA was great, but I mean, it probably has double-digits of teams there. It’s a big pool,” he said. “So you have to be winning championships. You have to be in the playoffs every year to have the fans and things show up.”

     Not only will they show up at Soldier Field, they’ll watch him more closely than any alderman. The fans know he likes pink. Take a recent USC women’s basketball game, where Williams had pink nails, pink lips, a pink phone and a pink wallet. Days passed. When word got around the football office, director of player relations Gavin Morris took to X and asked to see Williams’ phone.

     “The wallet’s white, the phone is pink, the case is clear,” Williams said.

     “What the fingernails look like?” Morris asked.

     “Nails are clear,” said Williams, waving his hand. “Lips are pink. Your girl love ’em.”

     If he has a better year than Stroud, every Bears supporter also will have pink nails and a pink phone. If not? In a hardass town, look out. Consider it more motivation. “It started, I would say, three years ago,” Williams said last fall. “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. This is where all the gold comes from.”

     He was asked about it by People magazine, with a deeper explanation. “It took everybody by surprise, just because you don't always see male athletes who play football paint their nails. But I think it's just another way of expression,” he said.

     Same goes if he cries after a game. He did so after a loss to Washington, where his mother covered his face with a sign. If he wins, everyone in Chicago will cry. If not?

     Let’s assume he finally is the answer to the unsolvable mystery. There’s a reason the McCaskeys, led by team president Kevin Warren, will announce plans Wednesday for a new lakefront stadium — “a state-of-the-art, publicly owned enclosed stadium, along with additional green and open space with access to the lakefront for families and fans, on the Museum Campus.” The team will spend $2 billion for a journey that will require $4 billion.

     I will dare go this far. If Caleb Williams wins one Super Bowl, much less eight, the entire town will pay for the rest of the ballyard.

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     Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.