Caleb’s Close-Up, Part 2: Where He Threw

In part one, we saw that Caleb was generally an above-average passer during the 2025 season. Today, we’re going to dive deeper into those stats to see if we can figure out how well he did throwing to different areas of the field.

Sorting by Depth

Let’s look at how frequently and effectively Williams targeted each depth of the field.

The table below shows information splitting the field into four areas, which I will refer to as behind the line, short (0-9 yards), medium (10-19 yards), and deep (20+ yards downfield).

Williams’ pass frequency, accuracy, completion percentage, and yards/attempt are shown, as well as how he ranked compared to 32 NFL QBs with at least 250 pass attempts. The best, average, and worst value from around the NFL is given, and any areas where Williams was in the top 25% are highlighted in green, while areas in the bottom 25% are highlighted in red. 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.)

[Quick note: I realize the numbers for frequency don’t add up to 100%, but this is PFF’s data, and it’s the same data for everybody, so I’m just rolling with it for a fair comparison. My guess is that they are excluding throwaway passes that didn’t have a clearly defined target, which account for the missing percentage.]

A few thoughts:

• In terms of where he threw the ball, Caleb targeted deep downfield fairly often and was average to slightly below average in targeting every other area of the field. This actually matches his rookie season quite well, though the behind the line of scrimmage passes dropped quite a bit from year 1 to year 2 (which is probably a scheme-related change). Caleb likes to take shots deep downfield, which is why we saw in part 1 he produces a high rate of explosive passes.
• What shows up clearly here is Caleb’s struggles with accuracy, which are mirrored in his low completion percentages. This is a repeat pattern from his rookie season, but showed up in a different way.
  • In 2024, Caleb was highly accurate on anything short or behind the line, but awful on anything medium to deep. In 2025, Caleb was accurate deep but awful on everything else.
    • The improvement in deep passing from year 1—>2 matches the same trend Caleb saw in college. In college, Caleb became even better as a deep passer in year 3, taking this part of his game from above average to elite, so hopefully that pattern continues in the NFL.
    • The new struggles in the short passing game are surprising, but are understandable given that Caleb was learning a new offense that asked him to go under center a lot more, which means he had to change his footwork. Caleb noted at the end of the season that footwork and accuracy are his main focus for improvement this offseason.

Of course, if accuracy struggles can be blamed on a new offense, it’s reasonable to expect that it should have improved as the season wore on and Caleb grew more comfortable. As you can see in the table below, that’s exactly what happened.

For the last 5 weeks of the season, Caleb saw his accuracy improve pretty much across the board, including going from average to elite as a deep passer. It’s too early to say for sure if this is simply a small sample size fluke (19 deep passes, 33 medium, 72 short, 24 behind the LOS) but if it is real and continues into 2026, he should be a much more consistent passer, which could take him from good to great overall as a QB.

Detailed Breakdown

Finally, I want to break up each depth into left, center, and right in order to get a feel for whether Williams’ strengths and struggles were focused on any part of the field horizontally in addition to vertically. The table below shows how frequently he targeted each zone as well as how effectively he threw it there, as measured in accuracy rate and yards/attempt. Zone depths are sorted from shortest on the bottom to deepest on top. The thick black horizontal line represents the line of scrimmage. As in the table above, all data is compared to 32 total qualifying QBs, with green cells indicating Williams ranked in the top 25% and red cells indicating he ranked in the bottom 25%.

A few thoughts:

• Pay attention to the % of throws before getting too worked up about any efficiency stats. We’re starting to divide up the overall sample into smaller sizes, so some of them will not carry a ton of weight. For instance, the right behind the line of scrimmage region represented only 19 Williams passes, which makes it hard to say if the poor accuracy there compared to other areas behind the line of scrimmage are real or a small sample size fluke (for what it’s worth, Caleb was accurate on 93% of his passes to that region in 2024, so my vote is fluke).
• It’s noteworthy that Caleb attacked the middle of the field more frequently in 2025 (46% of passes) than during his 2024 rookie season (40% of passes). This is a common area of growth for young QBs as they adjust to the speed of the NFL, and attacking the middle of the field is generally efficient (higher yards/attempt to the center compared to outside the numbers at every depth).
• We noted earlier in the article that Caleb excelled as a deep passer, but here we see that was pretty much all in the middle of the field. I wonder if that is due to deep middle passes being able to be more as rocket passes, while deep outside passes require more touch.
  • It’s also worth mentioning that Caleb’s late-season deep ball improvement we saw above was pretty much all outside the numbers.
    • Deep left: 25% accurate weeks 1-13, 50% weeks 14+
    • Deep middle: 74% accurate weeks 1-13, 75% weeks 14+
    • Deep right: 30% accurate weeks 1-13, 60% weeks 14+
    • Once again, this is a small sample size (19 total deep passes split amongst the 3 zones), so we don’t want to draw too many definitive conclusions from it. But I will be watching closely to see if this improvement continues into 2026.
• One interesting trend is that 27% of Caleb’s passes went to the right side, while only 17% went to the left. This is new from his rookie season, when 25% went left and 26% right. WCG head honcho Lester Wiltfong Jr. hypothesized it was maybe due to a higher rate of rollouts to the right, but it also could just be a fluke.

Lessons Learned:

In case you got lost in all the words, here are the main takeaways from this article:

• Caleb was generally one of the least accurate passers in the NFL for the 2nd year in a row. However, there is hope for improvement given that his accuracy struggles were in very different areas than his rookie season and he grew more accurate late in the year.
• One area where Caleb shined was as a deep passer, which mirrors his college growth. If the college trend continues in year 3, Caleb should be one of the NFL’s best deep passers in 2026.
• Fixing his accuracy through improved footwork is the #1 area of growth needed for Caleb to take the step from good to great QB.