Behind the Scenes at Heisman Weekend with Caleb Williams, the Face of the New College Football

By Alex Kirshner

The day before he wins the Heisman Trophy, Caleb Williams rolls out of bed at 10 a.m. There is a loud knock at his hotel room door, 40 floors above Time Square. Nine people are here to watch him change.

“Welcome,” he says. He rubs his eyes and gestures everyone inside.

Carl Williams, the USC quarterback’s father, leads the delegation. Behind him are two agents, the Trojans’ sports information director, a photographer, a videographer, a public-relations rep from Hugo Boss, a tailor from Hugo Boss, and a reporter.

Caleb is tired. He flew from Los Angeles to New York last night, a taxing enough trip even on a private jet. But he perks up when he sees what’s in the human-sized box that the Boss people have brought with them: a selection of suits, shirts, coats, and ties for the New York weekend ahead. It’s a VIP selection freshly off a plane from Germany, the Boss rep says. Last week, Williams got fitted at the Gucci store on Rodeo Drive for the suit he’ll wear to the Heisman ceremony. That leaves bookend events on Friday and Sunday — one casual, one black-tie. He asks USC’s PR person, Katie Ryan, about the dress code for one of the events. “The other candidates might be more casual, but you always like to be the best dressed in the room,” she tells him. He settles on a textured, all-gray suit with patching on the back that looks like armor.

Williams’ process for getting dressed, it turns out, is no less deliberate than figuring out how he might attack defense playing cover-two with a QB spy underneath. “Something like this,” he says, pointing to that armored gray suit, “I’ve never worn something like it, and neither has anybody else.” Especially not at a football awards dinner.

As he’s transitioned from a five-star recruit to one of the best players in college football the last two years, first at Oklahoma and now USC, Williams has invested a lot of thought (and sometimes money) into his game-day looks. “It’s for sure a ‘look good, feel good, play good’ thing,” he says, citing Deion Sanders’ famous maxim. “It’s your thing coming there. Dress how you want. We’ve got some guys that come in there with some USC stuff. We have some guys that come in dressed up like me.”

Wrapped in whatever Williams is wearing on any given day is a rare quarterback. In the first extended action of his career, he came off the bench for Oklahoma and led an 18-point comeback to beat Texas in 2021’s Red River Shootout. He was great but uneven as a true freshman, then went supernova after going west. He dazzled this fall to the tune of 4,075 passing yards and a 37-to-4 touchdowns-to-interceptions ratio, with 10 more touchdowns and some brilliant highlights as a runner.

Williams stands out for his ability to operate in USC’s offensive structure—but also, crucially, for the way he can freelance and conjure a lot out of broken plays. His expressiveness does not end when he puts his street clothes in his locker and straps on a helmet and shoulder pads. In fact, it is most evident when a play breaks down, a lesson Notre Dame learned the hard way a few weeks ago. “We call it Baller Mode,” he says, “and it’s always active in between the white lines. When things go downhill in a play, go make a play.”

All of which makes clear that Williams is proudly individualistic in an environment not built for individuals. Few sports more rigidly build adherence to team culture and a head coach’s own, sometimes autocratic personality than college football. That Williams walks into the L.A. Coliseum wearing rhinestone jeans and carrying a Louis Vuitton bag is itself a sign of how quickly the sport is changing, but also of Williams’s unique place within it. He is a quarterback for a new college football, not an old one, though he says if he’d been around 20 or 30 years ago, “I’d have been the same way.”

Williams on the run during the Pac-12 title game.

In July of 2021, facing mounting threats from state legislatures and the courts, the NCAA finally caved on something it said it would never do: The association allowed athletes to make endorsement money with the use of their name, image, or likeness. This meant that Williams, who enrolled at Oklahoma that fall as a can’t-miss quarterback prospect, arrived in college at an ideal time and on an ideal perch. He works with around 15 brands, his agents say, including Beats by Dre, Fanatics, and AC+ION Water, which helped him score Heisman tickets for eight of his offensive linemen. He has arrangements with Boss and Gucci for events like this weekend.

Williams is demure about what he’s already earned. He says NIL has made him financially independent, helping him achieve a goal he set when he was 12 and told his father he didn’t want to rely on him for money. Williams’ dad says his son doesn’t call home as much as he’d like. But there’s a bright side: “He’s not calling me asking for money.”

I ask Caleb, who grew up in D.C. and spent his freshman year in Norman, Okla., if he likes L.A., a place whose traffic makes the Capital Beltway look like the Autobahn.

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“You do need a car in L.A.,” he says.

“Do you have a car?”

“I do have a car.”

“What kind of car?”

“A pretty nice black car.” Williams starts to laugh. He’d rather not say what it is, not on the record, but concedes that it is electric. Despite the laundry list of brand deals, he’s still a college student with no interest in paying SoCal gas prices.

That Williams is at USC at all is a further sign of the times. At almost the same time the NIL gates opened, the NCAA dropped a rule that required most athletes that transferred schools to sit out a season before playing for their new team. In the hours following Williams’ freshman season at Oklahoma, his head coach, Lincoln Riley, bolted for USC in a splash move. Williams joined him, as did two dozen other transfers who helped return the Trojans to prominence more or less overnight. When USC is good, like it is now, the Trojans are not just the Western tentpole for all of college football, but a cultural institution in Los Angeles. “I want to be a part of that group, that fraternity that has done some special things,” Williams says. He mentions Reggie Bush, Matt Leinart, and a few more players. “Us as a team winning national championships or winning Pac-12 championships, I’ve got a few more years. Possibly one more year.”

It’s hard to overstate how completely Williams, a dressed-to-the-nines endorsement star who picked up from Norman to L.A. at the drop of a hat and immediately led a transfer all-star team to within a whisker of the sport’s playoff, has become a symbol of the ways college football is changing. Hours before taking the stage to compete for his sport’s highest honor, he takes it all in casually. “I don’t mind being a trailblazer or a trendsetter, however you want to put it. Lead from the front,” he says.

Williams is signing up for a life in the spotlight that exceeds even the usual focus on star quarterbacks. Immediately after I leave his room, an otherwise nice bartender off Time Square who turns out to have gone to UCLA will hear that I’m in New York for some Heisman events and say, “Caleb Williams? Oh, fuck that guy.” I ask Williams if he’s cool with 15 more years of lots of people who never meet him having strong takes about him, and he interjects, “Hopefully 20 or 21.”

Just as Williams hit college at an opportune time, he’s poised to do the same in the NFL. He will almost certainly hear his name called early in the draft in 2024, the first year he is eligible. (He does not close off the idea of a fourth college season in conversation, but anyone can see what’s coming.) The NFL’s salary cap is poised to jump considerably by the time Williams joins the league, and even more by the time he’d presumably be up for a lucrative second contract. When we meet, Aaron Judge has just signed his nine-year, $360 million deal to return to the Yankees. Reading that news, it’s not lost on Williams’ camp that, by the middle of Williams’ career, a good NFL quarterback could make Judge’s contract look paltry.

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Williams himself thinks a lot about business, though not so much in NFL contract terms. He mentions the saying that the NFL stands for “Not For Long,” and is already thinking about the ways he’ll supplement his eventual pro contract: he wants to own businesses, plural, and not just to make his money taking hits in NFL stadiums, but also while exerting much less effort. “That’s the thing that anyone wants,” he says. “To make money while you sleep.”

He has big, sometimes meticulous plans. But the most famous quirk of his Heisman season, as it happens, was more of a week-to-week thing. Williams believes in looking after his nails. He inherited that from his mother, Dayna Price, who started styling them for him when he was much younger than his current 20 years. Williams likes to spell out different messages on his fingernails on game days. Some of his nail dispatches are of love. (One week, he painted “988,” a suicide crisis hotline number.) Others are of war. (For the Pac-12 Championship, he painted “FUCK UTAH,” and then lost to the team he had cursed.) Williams says a given game’s message is “very impulsive and spontaneous,” but keeping his nails in shape is not. He shares a morsel of QB wisdom that could take him far at that position: “Your hands and your feet, they do all the work for you.”