Windy City Gridiron
A visual look at Caleb’s 2024 season.
A few years ago, I did some work with Passer Rating, the weird number that maxes out at 158.3. The tldr: Passer Rating is a useful, if limited, statistic combining interception percentage, TD percentage, completion percentage, and yards per attempt into one handy number. I followed that up with an examination of the increases in Passer Rating over time and tried to isolate which of the four components of Passer Rating were the reasons for the rising scores.
The first article mentions that it takes about 200 pass attempts for a quarterback’s Passer Rating to stabilize. That was certainly the case for Caleb Williams in 2024 as his 200th attempt on the year, the first pass to DJ Moore in Week 8’s loss to the Commanders, put his 2024 cumulative Passer Rating at 88.3. That would prove to be a smidge higher than his final Passer Rating of 87.8 after pass number 562, a spiked ball to set up a game winning field goal against the Packers in Week 18.
The image below depicts Caleb Williams’s cumulative Passer Rating for all 562 passes he made in 2024.
Williams’s final Passer Rating of 87.8 placed him between Drake Maye’s 88.1 and CJ Stroud’s 87.0, below the league average of 92.3. Back to the stabilization of 200 passes: essentially, an individual game is going to have a lot of noise in it to draw any real conclusions using Passer Rating. However, I do think it makes for a fun chart, as shown below:
Each game above has its own line that starts on the x-axis at the pass attempt number for the season and the y-axis at the Passer Rating for the first pass of that game. The last pass thrown in each individual game represents Williams’s passer rating for that game, while the unbroken black line shows the cumulative Passer Rating from above. As you move to the right, it becomes more difficult for one game to impact the overall cumulative score.
Given that I had built a ridiculous spreadsheet to make the above calculations, I was able to make one more chart that I think is fun to look at with some important caveats. Below is Caleb Williams’s cumulative Passer Rating broken out by target:
The first note is that the player with the most targets, DJ Moore, falls short of the 200 attempts stabilization number with only 141. Overall, you start to see the lines for the three receivers start to smooth out, all finishing fairly close to one another with Passer Rating to Moore leading the way at 93.87, Keenan Allen (121 targets) following closely at 92.44, and Rome Odunze (100 targets) at 86.83.
Cole Kmet (55 targets) and D’Andre Swift (51 targets) finished with better than average Passer Rating when targeted at 119.24 and 98.2, respectively. The attempts are low (and why were they so low, Shane?!) but Caleb did find success throwing to his top TE and RB. I...
