Windy City Gridiron
Earlier this offseason, I did an in-depth series exploring Caleb Williams’ rookie season and found that he especially struggled in two main areas: he was extremely inaccurate when passing downfield and took way too many sacks.
Neither of these should be much of a surprise to fans who watched Bears games last year, but what I want to explore today is how those struggles may or may not translate to 2025.
I’ll start with deep passes, which went at least 20 yards downfield. Williams was truly awful here, as you can see in the table below, where Williams is compared to all 48 rookie QBs to attempt 250+ passes since 2010 (all data from PFF). Ranks in the top 25% are highlighted in green, while those in the bottom 25% are in red.
That’s not pretty - Williams was one of the worst deep passing rookies the NFL has seen in the last 15 years.
Now the real question for today: does that mean Williams is likely going to be a terrible deep passer for his NFL career?
To begin exploring that, I looked at how that same QB sample did on deep passes in year 2. Actually, the sample shrunk a little here: only 37 of the QBs also attempted 250+ passes in their sophomore campaign, so I looked at their deep passing performances for each year to see if there was any predictive value. The graphs below show the year 1 vs. year 2 comparison for a variety of deep passing stats.
As you can see, there’s essentially no relationship between year 1 and year 2 deep passes in accuracy, completion percentage, yards/attempt, or even how often QBs throw the ball deep.
That should be fairly obvious visually, but I also tried to put a line through the data and get an R2 value, which tells you how well that line fits the data on a scale from 0-1. Numbers closer to 1 mean there is a stronger relationship, and all of these are less than 0.05, telling you that year 1 deep passing has essentially no impact on year 2.
That’s extremely good news for Bears fans - Williams was terrible throwing deep in 2024, but he’s just as likely to be good at it in 2025 as anybody else.
For a little anecdotal evidence, the QBs most similar to Williams in deep passing as a rookie were Blaine Gabbert, Brandon Weeden, Blake Bortles, Derek Carr, Marcus Mariota, Joe Burrow, and Trevor Lawrence. While that list includes several busts, it also includes long-term starters and even a top-tier passer in Burrow. In short, the full range of career outcomes was still in play for these QBs who struggled throwing deep as rookies, just as it is for Williams.
Let’s take the same look now at medium passing (10-19 yards downfield), where Williams was also bad as a rookie. The table below shows how he fared on these passes compared to the...
