This is the 5th in a 6-part series examining Caleb Williams’ 2025 season.
- In part one, we saw that Caleb Williams was generally an above-average passer during the 2025 season.
- Part two revealed that struggles with accuracy were his largest weakness, but that improved significantly late in the season.
- We saw in part three that Caleb was great at setting up scramble drill situations, but the Bears have to take better advantage of those opportunities.
- Part four found the pass protection was solid in 2025, but questions at C and LT create real concerns about how it will fare in 2026.
Today, we’re going to build off part four by exploring how well Caleb performed when he was pressured.
Under Pressure
The table below shows how Williams performed in a wide variety of statistics when kept clean (blue) vs. pressured (orange), and also includes Williams’ rank (in parentheses) out of 32 total NFL QBs who had at least 250 pass attempts. Information on the spread of all NFL QBs is also provided for each stat. Cells highlighted in green
indicate Williams was among the top 25% of QBs in this category, while those in red indicate Williams was in the bottom 25% of QBs. A further explanation of big time throws and turnover worthy plays was given in the play action article; generally, more big-time throws is good, and more turnover-worthy plays is bad. All data comes from Pro Football Focus (PFF) unless otherwise noted.
(If you can’t view the full figure, click on it to open in a new tab. Sorry about formatting issues.)
A few thoughts:
- Caleb’s accuracy and completion percentage were poor in both samples, which is to be expected given what we’ve seen earlier in this series. However, it’s worth noting that his accuracy was worse relative to NFL average when under pressure (7% below average) than kept clean (3% below average).
- This might be due to throwaways, as 22% of Caleb’s pressured passes were thrown out of bounds to avoid a sack or turnover. This was the highest rate in the NFL, and almost double the average rate of 12%.
- When kept clean, Caleb plays a more conservative style of football, keeping his target depth much shorter (even relative to his NFL peers) and not making many big-time throws. This leads to average efficiency in terms of yardage, but his relatively high turnover-worthy play rate (a continued trend from his rookie season) is less than ideal given the lack of aggressive plays.
- We actually see a lot of good when Caleb was pressured.
- Despite holding the ball longer than any QB, his sack rate was very low; 11% of pressures turned into sacks, 3rd best in the NFL and far below the average of 18%.
- Caleb also did a great job of pushing the ball down the field, producing big-time throws, and limiting turnover-worthy plays. That combination is very hard to pull off and should be extremely effective.
- The big plays are great, but the lack of consistency really hurts here. The yards/attempt mark is very low, and likely due to a combination of poor accuracy and receiver ineffectiveness in the scramble drill (which we saw in part 3).
- It doesn’t show up in this chart, but Caleb also scrambled quite frequently when pressured. 11% of his pressured dropbacks turned into scrambles, the 10th highest mark in the NFL (average 8%).
- PFF doesn’t have stats for efficiency on these scrambles, but Pro Football Reference says Caleb averaged a solid 8.7 yards/attempt on scrambles this season (this is all scrambles, not just when pressured).
Against the Blitz
Finally, I want to look specifically at how Williams performed when teams sent extra rushers at him on a blitz.
Much like the table above in the performance under pressure section, the table below shows how he fared in a variety of stats when blitzed (orange) and not blitzed (blue), and also gives context for how he ranked relative to the 32 qualifying NFL QBs. Cells highlighted in green indicate Williams was among the top 25% of QBs in this category, while those in red indicate Williams was in the bottom 25%.
A few thoughts:
- Teams blitzed Caleb Williams at the 4th highest rate of any QB in the NFL, but this seems like a pretty foolish idea to me. Williams posted the same sack rate and lower turnover-worthy play rate when blitzed, and his yards/attempt, big-time throw rate, and scramble rate were all appreciably higher.
- More scrambles is good, in this case, since we saw above Williams was an effective scrambler.
- This actually matches patterns from Williams’ rookie season, but he still saw a slight uptick in blitzes in 2025 compared to 2024. Maybe 2026 is when defensive coordinators will back off the blitzes a bit and make Williams beat a full coverage scheme more often.
- I find it interesting that Williams increased his pass depth by over a yard when blitzed. He used this as an opportunity to chase chunk plays, which is an effective approach if you can couple it to a low sack rate, like Williams did.
- It’s worth noting that Williams’ throwaway rate was extremely high against the blitz.
- 10% of his pass attempts when blitzed where thrown out of bounds, compared to an NFL average of 5%.
- When not blitzed, Williams’ throwaway rate dropped to 6%, while the NFL average remained fairly steady at 4%.
- In short, Williams responded to a blitz by trying to push the ball down the field, and if that option wasn’t there, he frequently threw the ball away or ran it himself.
- The point of blitzing from a defensive perspective is to harass the QB, and it’s worth seeing how effectively that happened.
- 42% of Caleb’s dropbacks against the blitz resulted in a pressure, which was right at the NFL average.
- 30% of Caleb’s unblitzed dropbacks resulted in a pressure, which was slightly better than the NFL average of 33%.
Lessons Learned
Here’s a quick recap of the main takeaways from today:
- Overall, Caleb seemed to do a bit better when blitzed and/or pressured than not blitzed and/or not pressured. That feels kind of weird, but speeding things up seems to bring out the best in him, namely his tendency to push the ball downfield and make big plays.
- One area where Caleb really struggled under pressure was gaining yards, which is likely due to a combination of poor accuracy and his teammates’ inability to capitalize on scramble drill situations.
- Williams consistently kept sack and turnover rates low when blitzed and/or pressured, in no small part due to a high rate of throwaways and scrambles.
