PRESNAP Week 3 cover. Against a peach background, a Chicago Bears quarterback kneels on an orange injury cart while a player in a white number 6 jersey lies face down on the ground. Cover lines read: The Great Cart-astrophe, Is Caleb Williams Performative?, An Examination of Hamstrings, Masculinity, and Greed.
Cover Art by John Lytle

The Great Cart-astrophe

Week 3 By John Lytle

We all saw it. Bears were within five yards of the end zone. Caleb Williams sprinted out left. Snap.

Suddenly everyone in America became a Doctor. I whispered, “Achilles.” The words just fell out of my mouth. I didn’t take a single science class in my four years at college. Where I got the confidence to diagnose an injury from my cramped living room in Brooklyn, I’m not sure, but I wasn’t alone: everyone at Soldier Field, and especially everyone on the Internet made their own diagnoses, none of them short of a season ending injury.

Caleb was carted off the field. This felt justified. He rode into the locker room, staring out at the crowd, and pumped his fist as tears poured down his face. Again, to everyone watching, this felt justified. For Chicago fans, this was Derrick Rose 2.0.

A Chicago Bears quarterback in a dark jersey, cut out and floating against a peach background, one fist raised as he is carried off.

But just when you think you’re Derrick Rose, you’re actually Paul Pierce. Caleb Williams suffered a Grade 1 Hamstring strain, a relatively manageable injury. As it stands today, Caleb Williams may play this Monday against the Eagles.

Caleb was a perfect target: “Hey honey, that asshole who paints his nails got carted off the field for a fucking hamstring!”

In less than 24 hours, Caleb Williams went from being a first-ballot future Chicago mural candidate to a first-ballot meme template. Every social media coordinator shared their shitty copy of a copy, and the great people on X built their own A.I. generated alternate histories of what happened.

It goes without saying that everyone criticizing Caleb is dumb. Think of what he was experiencing: you spend seven months training because all you want to do is win a championship for a city you moved to three years ago, and by a random act of God your leg falls apart and all of that work is thrown away right in front of you. He wasn’t crying because he can’t handle the physicality of the NFL (Caleb has been sacked 97 times in a little over 2 seasons), he was crying because in his mind, he let 3 million people down who have been begging for a championship for four decades. Critiquing Caleb for his emotions is the quickest way to reveal your ignorance and your greed for picking up bottom of the barrel, lowest common denominator engagement.

What baffles me, however, and what I think is the real story is the injury cart. Why was the fact that he rode the injury cart the object of everyone’s anger?

An empty orange injury cart tilted in the air against a peach background, with a player in a white number 6 jersey lying face down on the ground in front of it.

Well the injury cart itself is an odd, revealing symbol. When someone gets hurt, an agricultural vehicle rolls out from a dark hallway to sweep players off the field like crumbs. It’s a dramatic act that demands our attention and signifies to us that we need to stop the game, and try to resurrect our humanity. Every time this happens, we know exactly how to act: a slow clap from both fan bases while the announcers give a nice reminder on how good of a kid he is.

So maybe this is why people are so mad deep down. There’s a level of trust required when we bring out the cart, and when it turned out that Caleb maybe didn’t need that cart, this trust was broken.

But was it Caleb who asked for the cart and broke that trust? Of course not. The cart is always brought out by trainers and staff to expedite a player’s departure, and as expected, it was the Chicago Bears staff who asked for the injury cart to escort Caleb Williams last Sunday.

Despite how dumb this situation is, this event will have ripple effects. Jaxson Dart (an off-field antithesis to Caleb Williams) on Monday Night Football suffered a season ending knee injury, but walked off the field on his own, no cart needed. People were quick to make comparisons, but I wonder if he saw what happened with Caleb and decided to tough it out. Regardless, when he arrived at the tunnel to the locker room, there was a cart waiting to escort him.

The cart comes for us all.