NEWSLETTER
I’ve spent the last few weeks watching absurd amounts of tape on Caleb Williams and the other top quarterback prospects in the 2024 NFL Draft class, and I’m more confident than ever that the Chicago Bears should draft Williams and it’s really a no-brainer.
Williams has been the top quarterback prospect in this year’s draft class for years, and if you watch him, it’s easy to see why. I learned that when I got my first real Caleb Williams experience about 15 months ago while watching the Notre Dame-USC game.
Williams polished his Heisman Trophy résumé with 232 passing yards and four total touchdowns in a 38-27 victory over the No. 15 Fighting Irish. As a Notre Dame fan, I watched with envy, wondering why Notre Dame, for all their success over the years at other positions, could never land a quarterback like that.
Williams’ performance against Notre Dame in 2022 was magical, and his dagger of a 16-yard touchdown run with 2:35 to play felt like the icing on the cake in his bid for the Heisman. Williams hit the Heisman pose as “Heisman!” chants rang out at the Coliseum in Los Angeles. It was another moment in my Notre Dame fandom in which I watched another team get the quarterback position right, and all I could do was be envious.
If you’re a Notre Dame fan, there’s a good chance that you’re a Bears fan, as well, and that feeling is synonymous with both fandoms, never being able to land a quarterback like that.
But a quote from Notre Dame’s head coach Marcus Freeman a year after one of Caleb Williams’ most challenging games, this time a turnover-laden loss to the Fighting Irish in South Bend, has stuck with me through the months of studying Caleb Williams.
“I couldn’t speak more highly of the performance of our defense,” Notre Dame coach Marcus Freeman said in October. “I don’t know if there’s a perfect answer to stopping Caleb Williams. He is one of the best college football players I’ve ever seen. All I kept telling our guys was we have a plan, and on this play, you have to attack. You cannot play passive. You cannot play a three-man rush and let him go out there and be the Heisman Trophy winner he is.”
Even after Notre Dame made Williams look as human as any other team had in his collegiate career (and probably his entire football life), Freeman called Williams one of the best college football players he’d ever seen.
Plenty of comparisons regarding Caleb Williams at both ends of the spectrum of NFL success have been thrown around. He’s been likened to Patrick Mahomes due to his ability to evade pressure and operate out of structure in a wizardly-like fashion. He’s been called Johnny Manziel, one of the NFL’s all-time busts regarding collegiate success translating to Sunday’s.
Neither of those comparisons is true. Caleb Williams is not Patrick Mahomes. No one is Patrick Mahomes. He’s a one-of-one player, a three-time Super Bowl champion, and a three-time Super Bowl MVP at 28. His knack for the electric comeback has caused the NFL to literally rewrite the rules (see the Chiefs-Bills game in January 2021).
He’s also not Johnny Manziel, a much different quarterback who fled the pocket almost immediately rather than showing the poise and desire to extend to create with his arm that Williams does. Manziel’s failures in the NFL were — by his admission — a product of his drug and alcohol addictions and his general lack of desire to play football at that point in his life.
So, who is Caleb Williams, and what makes him the top quarterback in the 2024 NFL Draft class?
Novices gravitate to Caleb Williams’ highlight packages littered with mind-boggling out-of-structure successes, where the Patrick Mahomes comparisons originate. But the Caleb Williams scouting report is deeper than that. As Chicago Bears GM Ryan Poles said during his media availability at the NFL Scouting Combine, there are parts of Williams’ game that remind him of Mahomes—a quarterback he was a part of drafting during his time in Kansas City.
But Poles knows that there’s much more to the story than the highlights (or the lowlights, for that matter) cooked up for social media or SportsCenter. That’s why he’s the GM and the Twitter folk are not.
If you immerse yourself in the number of hours of Caleb Williams’ tape I have in recent weeks or that Poles and his staff indeed have, you come away with a different picture than the one social media paints for quick interactions. The evaluation is much more nuanced, and so is the prospect.
Williams wasn’t often afforded the opportunity to play within structure or a clean pocket, which led to the dazzling out-of-structure highlights (like this one!)
But when he had time to throw behind a brutally porous USC offensive line, his pocket poise, processing speed, and clean, quick, and repeatable throwing motion were displayed. It’s when Williams has some time (and I mean reasonable time, not all day long) that you can see how those traits translate to plus accuracy and ball placement on a variety of throws that range from Sunday throws like intermediate and deep corner routes, slants and posts over the middle of the field, short stick and comeback routes, and even the short stuff from the Lincoln Riley RPO game.
The notion that Williams lives on the out-of-structure plays is a fallacy. Anyone who has done the due diligence required to have an informed opinion on the topic would tell you the same thing.
Observing quarterback prospects requires an eye for their ability to consistently make successful quick and precise throws that result in first downs. This skill is crucial in generating efficient plays and moving the chains. A quarterback who can make these proper decisions repeatedly, without the assistance of play-action or run-pass options, is a valuable asset to any team and helps ensure long-term success for an offense. Williams can meet these expectations when given a clean pocket to work with. He can deliver accurate passes to his outside wide receivers on isolated routes, even when they are tightly guarded, giving them opportunities to catch the ball.
Here’s a compilation of a bunch of in-structure throws from Caleb Williams. Clean, on-time, accurate throws that will translate to Sunday.
Remember when I said that it’s essential for quarterbacks to be able to win in the pocket and not need things like play-action to create their opportunities? Pro Football Focus has Williams ranked in the 99th percentile in non-play action passing. His no-pressure passing grade is 93.4, better than any other quarterback in college football, and his deep passing grade (regardless of pressure) is 95.5, which ranks fifth. I also said that it’s essential for a quarterback to be able to move the chains and string first downs together, regardless of the situation. PFF has Williams in the 99th percentile in passing past the sticks.
But he doesn’t need a clean pocket to show off his elite arm and ball placement. I often watched USC’s offensive line crumble immediately after the snap. Williams’ poise and desire to stay in the pocket and make a throw is unmatched in this class (and, quite frankly, better than most current NFL quarterbacks).
There are no perfect prospects, and Caleb Williams has his flaws (but his time to throw is not one of them)
Nothing in life is perfect. Quarterback prospects aren’t exempt from that rule, no matter how heavily the pros column weighs.
A few things stuck out to me as negatives for Williams in all the games I watched. First, he has poor ball security behind and around the line of scrimmage. When navigating through traffic, he tends to hold the ball with one hand, leaving himself susceptible to fumbles and turnovers. It showed on tape and in the stat sheets.
In that play, you can see the ball being handled with one hand and waved around as he weaves in and out of traffic. It helped lead to 32 fumbles in his collegiate career, most of which came in this situation. However, it also led to many more of those incredible plays we talked about, which you’ve seen so many times on social media that I don’t need to share here.
Williams’ never-ending desire to create with his arm rather than his legs is one of his best traits. He’s always looking to reset his body and make a throw from trouble, and that ball hanging around as it does is one of the ways he does it, keeping that arm and ball ready to fire at a moment’s notice. Now, that will have to be cleaned up at the NFL level. You simply can’t average 11 fumbles per season and get away with it, especially in the pros.
But I’m confident that number will be slashed in half simply by putting him behind a remotely competent offensive line and giving him receivers that can separate with regularity. The rest will be a conversation of risk-reward and when it’s not worth the improv.
Speaking of the offensive line and the improvisation skills that complement Williams’ game, many have concerns about his Time to Throw (TTT). On paper, it doesn’t look great. Williams’ 2023 TTT was 3.27 seconds, the longest in college football and the longest by any quarterback prospect since 2014.
But as Kyle Morris so wonderfully put into words in a post at DBB recently, the tape tells a much more optimistic story than the number itself.
“The TTT was outrageously long, and his Pressure To Sack rate (19.4%), though not particularly awful, was not particularly great either. His much-hyped ability to manipulate the pocket and avoid the rush had drawn comparisons to Mahomes, but Mahomes (11.3% pressure to sack rate, 2.81 seconds TTT) never held the ball that long and was much more difficult to sack. My eyes told me Caleb was special; my numbers said he might be special in a dangerous way.
“The only answer was to keep digging. The first clue that Caleb might not be your typical high-to-throw scrambler came when I found that, according to Pro Football Focus, Caleb has averaged well over 6 seconds per scramble throughout all three seasons of his college career, including a staggering 6.58 seconds per scramble this year. That seemed extraordinarily high, so I compared it to other QBs and found that he was consistently taking almost a full second longer on scrambles than almost any QB, even other high Time To Throw guys.
“Why does this matter? Isn’t it a bad thing that he’s taking longer to scramble than any other QBs? You might think, but what I’ve found is that Caleb’s high overall TTT is most likely a mirage skewed entirely by how long his scrambles are because compared to other QBs (and especially other high TTT QBs), Caleb doesn’t scramble to run often at all”
Among quarterbacks recently drafted with an average TTT north of three seconds, Caleb Williams has the lowest overall percentage of dropbacks ending in a scramble (6.2%), the lowest percent of pressured dropbacks ending in a scramble (12.4%), and the lowest percent of scrambles from a clean pocket (3%).
Taking into account the film and the statistics above, it’s clear that Caleb Williams doesn’t hold the ball for an extended period of time when he’s in the pocket and passing; he’s holding the ball when he’s forced out-of-structure and searches relentlessly for a play downfield rather than tucking the ball and running. It also shows that Williams abandons a clean pocket to scramble at a microscopically low rate.
In short, to say that Williams’ is comparable to Justin Fields in that specific light would be factually incorrect both by the tape and the statistics.
People have likened Caleb Williams to Patrick Mahomes and many others, but I have a different NFL comparison for Williams
Bears fans will hate this … but my NFL comparison for Caleb Williams is Aaron Rodgers. Rodgers and Williams are incredibly similar in their tendency to buy time with their legs to make a throw rather than run.
In the NFL, wide receivers are excellent. Perhaps more athletically gifted and surgical with their craft than we’ve ever seen before. Time to throw is a defense’s worst enemy and a game-plan buster if there ever was one. What Williams and Rodgers do so well — and so similarly — is but enough time for their wide receivers to break down the defense’s coverage and find space. Because they’re reluctant to scramble for yardage and endlessly patient in their pursuit of the big throw, they can find these breakdowns in coverage and make the defense pay with frequency.
In Aaron Rodgers’ MVP season in 2016 — when he threw for 4,400 yards and 40 touchdowns — Rodgers’ clean scramble rate was 4.3 percent. Last season, Williams’ was 3.0 percent.
The allure of Caleb Williams to many is the similarities to Patrick Mahomes — with recency bias playing a significant factor in that evaluation — but his true NFL comparison is Rodgers.
After spending 15 seasons tormented by Rodgers, it’ll be a welcomed sight to see a quarterback do what he did to the Bears in a Bears jersey on Sundays for the foreseeable future.
