Troy Dodd

Caleb Williams is about to keep $10 million that almost every player in the NFL just hands over to somebody else. He doesn't have an agent. Never did. Next year he's up for a new deal with the Bears, and Albert Breer expects the 2024 quarterback class to clear $70 million a year. On a five-year contract, an agent is allowed to take up to 3% of that. That's $10.5 million walking out the door for one negotiation. For perspective, his entire four-year rookie contract was $39.49 million. The fee he's skipping is worth more than a quarter of it. Wouldn't five lawyers cost more than one agent? Not even close. Say they bill $1,500 an hour, which is what partners at top firms charge. $10.5 million pays for 7,000 hours, or 1,400 hours per lawyer. That's about eight months of full-time work for each of them. A quarterback extension takes a few weeks of real work, maybe a couple of months if talks get messy. He'd have to be getting robbed for the lawyers to cost more than the commission. There's a less obvious reason this works, and it comes down to who's loyal to who. A big agency negotiates with the same 32 teams every single year on behalf of dozens of players. Your deal is one of hundreds they'll do with those GMs over a career, so they have every reason to stay on good terms with the front office. Caleb's lawyers have one client in that building, and he pays them by the hour whether the Bears like them or not. He split the job up, too. Agents usually handle the contract, the marketing, the PR and the money advice all in one package and take a cut of everything. Caleb hired a separate person for each piece, the way a company staffs departments. He even started his own investment firm, 888 Midas, a month before he signed his rookie deal. He isn't the first quarterback to go without an agent. Lamar Jackson did it with his mom by his side, and his talks with Baltimore dragged on for about two years, through a franchise tag and a public trade request, before he landed $260 million with $185 million guaranteed. He saved around $7.8 million in fees and took a lot of that heat by himself. Caleb built a whole staff around the same idea. After last season, when he took the Bears to their first division title since 2018 and led the league with six fourth-quarter comebacks, he has the leverage to use it. When Chicago sits down to pay him next year, every person on Caleb's side of the table will be someone he hired, and he'll know exactly what each one costs.