LOS ANGELES — When Caleb Williams was coming out of middle school, just a DMV kid with a quarterback pipe dream and a love for Stanford, his father Carl planned a vacation for them to California to drive around some college campuses.
While you’re at it, Williams’ longtime QB coach Chris Baucia recommended Carl, link up with this guy: Will Hewlett, then a burgeoning QB guru trying to get a training business off the ground. Back then, in their first meeting in Northern California, Williams was a “little guy” about a foot shorter than Hewlett, the trainer remembered. And Hewlett was too fresh in his career, at that point, to even foresee the heights Williams could reach.
But they kept the film from that very first session together, and Hewlett became a key piece of a future that Williams and his father molded with their own hands. Williams rarely saw Hewlett in-person through high school and much of college football at USC, but sent him constant film of workouts as Hewlett’s own business grew, the trainer regularly poring over clips of 30-40 throws from Williams and texting the quarterback back an evaluation.
“As soon as that trip happened,” Baucia remembered, “we knew that there was a plan even after his college career.”
A decade later, as rumors around Williams’ character, whereabouts and draft processes have swirled endlessly since the end of his junior season at USC, the quarterback has spent the majority of the last two months holed up with Hewlett for pre-draft work in Ponte Vedra, Florida – home to Hewlett’s business CORTX Sports Performance, as Hewlett has grown into a nationally recognized QB trainer with several NFL clients.
“He has, for all intents and purposes, been a Florida resident,” Hewlett said of Williams.
When Williams’ name is called Thursday at the NFL Draft in Detroit, Michigan – in all likelihood as the No. 1 pick by the Chicago Bears – it will mark the culmination of a journey that has been built as much off a hyper calculated plan as it has Williams’ sheer talent. No decision about Williams’ future since that Northern California trip, as Baucia said, has been made without strategy. That’s become more apparent than ever through his pre-draft process, where Williams has raised eyebrows nationally across everything from his combine participation to his decision not to hire a traditional NFL agent.
What hasn’t been understood, through months of nonstop criticism of Williams’ approach, is that every fiber of this tightly knit web has been spun for years. It has pulled in Hewlett, a guy who according to his LinkedIn was balancing a day job at Dick’s Sporting Goods around the time he met Williams. It has pulled in a team of lawyers, and nationally renowned strategic consulting firm Smith & Company, setting up an NIL and branding empire that has eliminated much of the need for a traditional pre-draft agent.
“There’s not one stone that hasn’t been turned over to find out the best at what they need for him,” Baucia said of Williams’ team. “And when they find it, they stick with it. That’s what they do.”
A precise weekly routine designed for an NFL QB
No – Caleb Williams did not, in fact, pause his pre-draft training for a spontaneous Tokyo vacation with his girlfriend.
He had decided to skip throwing at the combine early enough, Hewlett said, to push back the timeframe for his training. Since early February, he has been entrenched for five to six days a week at CORTX’s facility in Florida, undergoing a rigorous workout structure designed specifically for pro quarterbacks – everything from throwing to 3D motion-capture of Williams’ arm-action to breaking down film with established NFL QBs. He has an apartment there, Hewlett said. A car, too.
“He has not stopped one bit,” Hewlett said, “to a point where, like, he made people adjust their schedules to fit around his training. Which is why, when I see this stuff online, it just makes me roll my eyes.”
In particular, after Williams took a brief trip back to L.A. to throw at USC’s Pro Day last month, Hewlett and his team designed training for Williams as if he were already a pro quarterback, a highly precise weekly regimen with the goal not to improve but to fine-tune aspects of his mechanics for the NFL. Hewlett described, in-depth, Williams’ weekly structure as such to the Southern California News Group:
Monday (high-volume throwing): Between 90-120 throwing reps, then lower-body performance work – change of direction, acceleration, cuts – then a session dedicated to breaking down NFL fronts and coverages, then a lift and corrective exercises, then soft-tissue recovery work.
Tuesday (lower-volume throwing): More throwing reps, then more lower-body performance work – usually involving top-end speed – then lifting, more NFL work, and more recovery.
Wednesday (no throwing): A heavy lift day, with mobility exercises and recovery.
Thursday (NFL-structured route throwing): Throwing to live receivers on quick, intermediate and deep balls, breaking down one-hitch and two-hitch throws, mobility field-work, NFL film breakdown.
Friday (chaos work): Throwing to multiple receivers while reading a defender, working on high-pressure and off-platform situations, more lifting, more corrective exercises – you get the picture.
Saturday (flex day): More film work, breaking down one of Williams’ old games.
Sunday (rest day): Rest. Rinse. Repeat.
Along the process, Williams has spent multiple days training alongside and picking up “bits and pieces,” as Hewlett put it, from other CORTX clients – most notably San Francisco 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy and Indianapolis Colts quarterback Anthony Richardson. In one session, Hewlett brought in NFL veteran Nathan Peterman to break down Richardson’s film from a Rams-Colts game in October, with Williams sitting in and taking notes.
And after Williams spent much of his junior season running for his life and trying to weave off-platform miracles – leading to a primary pre-draft criticism of the amount of time he held onto the ball at USC – there has been an emphasis in training, Hewlett said, not on changing Williams’ game but simply honing the timing required at the NFL level. Ball control. Checkdowns.
“There was a level of structure that I think Caleb was very hungry for,” Hewlett said, “that I think the NFL is going to provide.”
Preserving his stock
From his final moments in a USC uniform – disappearing from the Coliseum without speaking to media, waving good-bye to fans following a November loss to UCLA – Williams has been in a fairly unique position, as legendary NFL agent Leigh Steinberg described: not needing to boost his stock, but preserve it.
“I think it’s a bit of a unicorn,” Steinberg said, speaking to the Southern California News Group for his thoughts on Williams not hiring a traditional agent.
Williams’ status as the prospective No. 1 pick in 2024 has held steady since the start of the 2023 season, even through a rocky year of growth for Williams and struggle for USC, even as potential top pick candidates like North Carolina’s Drake Maye and LSU’s Jayden Daniels emerged. So when Williams announced via an ESPN story in late February he wasn’t planning to sign with an agent before the draft, it made waves – but hardly surprised many in the industry who knew of Williams’ camp.
“I think Carl was not … he wasn’t comfortable with how, the way most agents handled things, and felt they could do a better job,” Steinberg said.
Quite simply, the need for many advantages of an NFL agent had already been set in place by Williams and his father, as Steinberg and others outlined.
Typically, an agent would set up marketing opportunities around and past the draft – except Williams has already built one of the most expansive NIL empires in this era of college football, with The Athletic pinpointing he had made as much as $10 million through endorsement deals while at USC.
Typically, an agent would set up some sort of post-career plans, like a charitable foundation – except Williams’ Caleb Cares foundation has already been in place and thriving for years, Williams and his father working with now-director Patsy Mangus since he was in his freshman year of high school at Gonzaga College High.
Typically, an agent would set up and front costs for pre-draft training – except Williams has plenty of dough to do so himself, and that decades-long relationship established with Hewlett.
“I don’t think he hurts himself by not having an agent at this stage of the game,” said former NFL agent Chuck Price, who once represented former USC great Matt Leinart.
The one uncertain facet, in an ambiguous situation, is who in Williams’ camp will actually handle initial contract negotiations, and primary communications with a franchise like the Bears. But Williams has another ace entrenched deep up his sleeve: Smith & Company, a D.C.-based strategic advisory firm that works closely with Williams and whose founder, Judy Smith, is so well-known for her White House ties in crisis management that she was the basis of the TV show “Scandal.”
And the initial decision to handle pre-draft operations in-house, largely, has succeeded. There’s been an abundance of talking-head criticism and legitimate questions around his emotional growth, but no legitimate scandal or knock on Williams’ character, as his entire person has been picked apart for the last several months. Stock preserved.
“They’ve had a plan the whole time,” Steinberg said, “and I respect it.”
In action for USC’s Pro Day
A shoulder-to-shoulder semicircle congealed around the sidelines of USC’s Allyson Felix Field on March 20, conglomerates of pro scouts on hand to watch Williams dish at USC’s Pro Day.
It was a mere few weeks after he had caused a national stir with his maneuverings around standard procedures at the NFL Combine, electing not to throw – by no means unusual for top quarterbacks in the past – but also to skip medical testing until specific team interviews, telling media “there’s only one of me” in his reasoning. He could only get drafted by a handful of teams, Williams explained; why would he reveal his detailed medical records to all 32 franchises?
“I think some of this stuff is not just for him; it’s to lay some foundation for the guys coming behind him, too,” Baucia said of Williams’ reasoning. “Like, really – do you have to show and give everybody something that personal?”
When asked at the combine why he didn’t throw, Williams pointed out that he had played 30-plus games of college football. Go ahead and go watch real live ball of me, Williams said, smiling. It seemed unlikely, then, that he would elect to venture back from Florida to throw at Pro Day, little need to demonstrate big-play prowess.
But Williams placed a heavy focus, Hewlett said – the trainer accompanying Williams to Los Angeles – on operating under center and off play-action routes. And Williams viewed throwing at Pro Day different than the combine, Hewlett said, for one simple reason: he would be throwing to his USC teammates.
“He felt that it was important that he was there throwing, because obviously the attention of him there throwing was going to be helpful for everyone else there participating in it,” Hewlett said. “More eyes on his teammates. And he’s the type of guy where, that stuff matters to him.”
He operated with all the joy of a kid freewheeling around the backyard, that Pro Day, flashing smiles at fellow soon-to-be draftees Tahj Washington and Brenden Rice, leaping for a post-throw chest-bump with Rice when the afternoon finished. Perhaps embellished, for the eyes trained on his neck. Perhaps not.
One day in recent weeks, after Williams had finished a throwing session, Hewlett began to play catch with his son Locklan, a rising high school senior committed to South Florida. The Florida winds whipped, upwards of 20 miles per hour. But Williams stayed, intrigued.
Eventually, he rose and stood next to Locklan. Why don’t you try this? he asked, motioning at Locklan’s grip, discussing front shoulder action. Hewlett stood back, on the other end of their tosses. An hour passed.
“There’s no show, right,” Hewlett remembered. “Like, there’s three people on that field. There’s no cameras. There’s no media guy. There’s no nothing.”
“He’s just doing it,” Hewlett continued of Williams, “because the dude frickin’ loves ball.”
