This is the 3rd 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.
Today, we’ll continue diving deeper into Williams’ statistics profile to try and figure out how well he performed in a few different play types.
Play Action
Let’s start by looking at how Caleb Williams did on play-action drop backs compared to standard passing plays. Before I present the full data, I want to briefly explain two PFF stats that will be used:
- Big Time Throw. These are best described as a pass with excellent ball location and timing, generally thrown further down the field and/or into a tighter window. In other words, these are really good, difficult passes that should result in highly valuable big plays. A higher % here is better.
- Turnover Worthy Play. These include fumbles in the pocket, interceptions thrown, and interceptable passes that were not caught. A lower % here is better.
Both of these stats will admittedly have some subjectivity, but they provide a useful
glimpse into how frequently a QB makes a really good play vs. a really bad one.
The table below shows how Williams performed in a wide variety of statistics in play action (orange) vs. other dropbacks (blue), 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. 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:
- As expected, Caleb Williams had a much higher rate of play action passes in 2025 than his rookie season, when play action accounted for only 17% of his pass attempts. This continues a Ben Johnson trend from his time in Detroit.
- It makes sense too, as QBs are generally better in play action (higher completion percent and yards/attempt, fewer turnover-worthy plays and sacks). Caleb mostly followed the same trends as his NFL peers, though it’s worth noting his turnover-worthy play % was much higher on play-action plays.
- The biggest thing that stands out is that Caleb has one of the longest average times to throw of any QB in the NFL in both samples, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Time to throw is a measure of play style, not play effectiveness.
- Caleb likes to hold the ball and hunt big plays, which is fine as long as it doesn’t lead to too many sacks. It did not in 2025, so that isn’t anything to be concerned about.
- Caleb’s sack rates and pressure to sack rates (the % of pressures that turn into sacks) are extremely low in both samples, which we should expect to see in most samples going forward. Caleb was great in this area in 2025.
- As expected, Caleb’s accuracy and completion % are low in both samples. We looked at that in part 2, and it should be expected to be that way in pretty much every sample for this whole series.
- One thing I noticed is that the difference between accuracy and completion percentage was 9% in play action passes and 15% on other passes, while the NFL average drop was in the 9-10% range for both samples. This can mostly be accounted for by receiver drops: Caleb saw a 5.6% drop rate (around NFL average) on play action passes but a 9.4% drop rate on non-play action passes. It’s hard to chalk this up to anything more than a weird coincidence.
- Play action really plays into Caleb’s strengths pushing the ball downfield. The average target depth was much higher, and Caleb did appreciably better (relatively) in yards/attempt as well. Caleb also did a great job of producing big-time throws in play action, which likely led to plenty of explosive passes (though I don’t have the ability to parse the data and see which of those were in play action).
Time to Throw
Let’s look now at a different way to split a QB’s pass attempts, based on how long it took him to throw the ball. PFF splits this into less than 2.5 seconds and more than 2.5 seconds.
There’s going to be some overlap with the play action data here, as the time to throw is generally longer on play action than other plays (average 3.2 vs. 2.7 seconds, as shown in the table above). So, we might expect to see some of the similar trends as above, but this is still a different enough way of parsing the sample that some results might be unique.
The table below shows the same stats as the play action one above. Once again, Williams’ data is shown ranked out of the 32 QB sample, information is provided about the spread of the 32 QBs, and cells for Williams’ stats in green or red represent Williams ranking in the top 25% or bottom 25%, respectively.
A few thoughts:
- As expected given his high time to throw mark, Caleb has a very low rate of passes thrown in under 2.5 seconds. These quick passes are mostly designed plays, with an extremely short target depth, no big-time throws, and very low rates of negative plays. The accuracy on these passes needs to be better (as we saw in part 2) in order to help the Bears consistently pick up small chunks of yards and stay ahead of the chains.
- The slower-developing plays, then, representing the bulk of Caleb’s passes, nearly 2/3 of his attempts. Again, this is a play style thing, and there is zero reason to be concerned about the slow time to throw given the low sack rate on these plays.
- On these passes, Caleb does a good job pushing the ball down field, and producing big-time throws. Once again, we see the accuracy needs to improve, but that’s a given across the board.
- Something else that needs to improve is the yardage gained. Caleb does a great job of buying time while avoiding sacks, which should lead to a high rate of chunk plays that pick up big yardage as pass catchers have ample time to work open. The average yards gained here, however, are quite poor, which needs to change.
- This gets exacerbated when you look only at passes from outside the pocket. Caleb escaped the pocket at the 2nd highest rate in the NFL, did a great job avoiding sacks and turnovers in those situations, and threw a pass from outside the pocket at a very high rate. These are all really good things.
- However, Caleb’s adjusted net yards/attempt, yards per dropback, and passer rating outside the pocket were all quite poor. This suggests the Bears pass catchers need to improve significantly in the scramble drill, something Ben Johnson recently highlighted to the media.
- I (and likely many Bears fans) still have nightmares of Aaron Rodgers breaking out of the pocket, holding the ball for 5-6 seconds, and then firing a rocket 40 yards downfield to a wide open receiver. He did that to the Bears too many times to count, and Caleb Williams has the ability to do the same thing. It’s on the receivers to learn how to work open in those situations.
Lessons Learned
In case you got lost in all the numbers above, here are today’s main takeaways:
- Caleb Williams got to benefit from play action more than most NFL QBs, and did well producing big plays here while avoiding negative ones. Issues with accuracy, however, hurt his overall productivity in play action.
- Poor accuracy is also a big issue with quick-hitting passes that need to reliably produce small gains but instead turned into incompletions too frequently.
- Caleb showed a clear ability on slow-developing plays to get outside the pocket and buy time for his receivers to work open, but the Bears did a poor job of capitalizing on these opportunities.
