Caleb Williams confirms suffering ‘a pretty serious’ torn hamstring

Chicago Bears quarterback Caleb Williams has missed the team's last three games with a hamstring injury, and for nearly a month, neither he nor the Bears had offered much clarity on just how bad it was. That changed on Thursday.

During a press conference ahead of this week's game against the Atlanta Falcons, Williams revealed that he actually suffered a "pretty serious" hamstring tear, not the strain that had been widely reported, though he still refused to say exactly how severe it was.

Williams went down without contact on a fourth-quarter scramble during the Bears' 9-3 loss to the Minnesota Vikings on Sept. 20. He was carted off the field at Soldier Field with a towel over his head, and Tyson Bagent took over at quarterback.

The day after the game, head coach Ben Johnson called the results of Williams' imaging "somewhat encouraging," and he declined to put a timeline on the quarterback's return.

"I'm not putting a timeline on this. We're going to say week-to-week," Johnson said at the time, via ESPN .

The Bears didn't immediately rule Williams out for their Week 3 game against the Philadelphia Eagles, either, and they never publicly confirmed the specifics of his injury.

Six days after the injury, ESPN's Adam Schefter and NFL Network's Ian Rapoport reported that Williams had a Grade 2 hamstring injury with a three-to-four-week timeline. That report noted that the Bears had "tried to keep the extent of his injury under wraps for competitive-purpose advantages."

From there, Williams' injury was commonly described as a hamstring strain, and some reports labeled it a Grade 2 strain.

Speaking to reporters on Thursday for the first time since the injury, Williams pushed back on all of those reports.

"It was a hamstring tear," Williams said, according to Dan Wiederer of The Athletic . "And a pretty serious one."

When asked what grade of tear he had suffered, Williams shut the question down.

"We got a grade, but I wouldn't say it's deserved to be put out there," he said. "After all the false ones. So next question."

Williams was then asked why neither he nor the Bears had made an effort to clarify the extent of the injury while those reports were circulating. Again, he declined to answer.

Williams went on to argue that almost nothing reported about his injury has been accurate.

"There's nothing that has come out that has been right about what this is and what it has been. So that's been fun to deal with," Williams said. "If you haven't heard it from Boss Man himself (Johnson) or out of the horse's mouth, me, it would probably be wrong."

It's worth noting that Johnson and Williams were the ones who had chosen not to share those details in the first place.

While Williams completed a full practice on Thursday for the first time in almost four weeks, he said that he still has checkpoints to clear and a "stress test" to pass before returning, and he does not yet know if he will play against the Falcons.