Former USC QBs Jaxson Dart, Caleb Williams finally will square off on playing field
Giants quarterback Jaxson Dart, left, and Chicago Bears quarterback Caleb Williams. Credit: Jim McIsaac; AP / Joshua A. Bickel
Jaxson Dart wants to make sure the order of events is understood.
“I left before he got there,” the Giants’ rookie quarterback said this week.
It’s a little like a “you can’t fire me because I quit” situation. But Dart is right. He didn’t leave Southern Cal after his freshman season because Caleb Williams came to campus. He didn’t hit the transfer portal — common now but a somewhat scandalous egress strategy using the newly established rule in 2021 — and flee to Ole Miss because Williams took his job.
There certainly were signs of all that happening when the Trojans fired the coaching staff that had recruited Dart and brought in Lincoln Riley from Oklahoma, where he had coached the highly touted Williams during his freshman season. Williams, though, technically had yet to commit to USC by the time Dart figured out where Mississippi is on a map (he has said he didn’t know it until he made his way to Oxford) to become a record-breaking quarterback there.
“Yeah,” Dart said, again confirming the timeline.
His timestamps and receipts are in order.
The point of all this posturing and squaring of the chronology is pretty simple: Dart wants it to be clear, despite perceptions, that he wasn’t beaten out by Williams. There was, in fact, never a true showdown between them.
That will change on Sunday.
That is when Dart and Williams, two of the youngest starting quarterbacks in the league, will be leading two of the oldest franchises in the sport against each other. For the first time, they will get a chance to see who is better.
A feud — real or manufactured, it doesn’t really matter — that began in the warm West Coast sun is about to be settled on a potentially snowy field alongside Lake Michigan.
For someone like Dart, that’s the kind of narrative he can appreciate. The kind he typically rises up to meet.
“It’s competition,” he said of finally meeting Williams on the field. “He’s a really good player. Super-talented, obviously. It’s going to be fun to match up against him and compete.”
They’ve crossed paths before, naturally. They train in proximity with each other in California and, as Williams said this week, “he obviously has friends who were my friends at USC, so he’s been around.”
And, of course, they have followed each other’s exploits in college and the NFL.
“I think he’s been doing a great job,” Williams said. “He’s providing a spark for that team. Kudos to him.”
But just as conspicuous as Dart’s insistence on the timeline of events at USC was Williams’ chilly description of their relationship. He not only immediately corrected the idea that they were ever teammates but later said: “We’re not friends or anything.”
Apparently this game means a lot to both of the quarterbacks.
We’ve already learned a lot about Dart as a player and as a person from his first six starts with the Giants.
“My dad coached me really hard when I was a kid,” Dart said. “It never mattered what opponent I was playing, what game I was playing. Even if it’s just ping-pong in the basement, me and him would go at it. I hate that losing feeling, regardless of anything. Even if I’m playing pickleball and I lose, that’s going to ruin my whole day. I just think that’s something that’s been instilled in me in family aspects since I was young.”
That’s why leaving USC, even though it turned out to be for the best for all involved, still clearly sticks with him. He was just an 18-year-old true freshman who was supposed to be redshirting before he was thrust into a starting role because of injuries, but he went 0-3 there. It’s the one place in his athletic life where he did not succeed. And Williams, of course, did.
Williams won the Heisman Trophy in his first season there and became the first overall pick by the Bears in the 2024 draft. Dart came out a year later as the 25th overall pick.
There probably is an alternate universe in which Dart remained at USC and was drafted by the Bears and Williams left Oklahoma for someplace else, perhaps Ole Miss, where he was befriended by the Manning family and then came to the Giants.
There is even a more realistic scenario in which some of Dart’s current coaches could be Williams’. Not only was Williams on the Giants’ radar during the 2024 lead-up to the draft, even though everyone assumed he would be going first to Chicago, but Giants offensive coordinator Mike Kafka interviewed for the Bears’ vacant head coach job in January.
The way things eventually worked out? It’s fair to say that both Williams and Dart came out of it as winners.
Only one of them will be able to do so on Sunday, though.
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.
