How good was Caleb Williams as a rookie?
Expectations were sky high for Chicago’s signal caller after they drafted him with the #1 overall pick, added playmakers like Keenan Allen, Gerald Everett, D’Andre Swift, and Rome Odunze to the offense, and tapped Shane Waldron, one of the most highly regarded offensive coordinators on the market, to lead the unit. Many in the media argued that Williams was stepping into a historically good situation for a QB selected #1 overall.
Offseason optimism quickly turned into a real-life dumpster fire, however.
- Gerald Everett was clearly washed up and managed only 36 receiving yards (this should not have been a surprise).
- Keenan Allen spent a good chunk of the season looking washed up and had arguably the worst healthy season of his career.
- DJ Moore, fresh off a career season and monster extension, spent much of the year looking disinterested in playing football and had one of the worst seasons of his career.
- Chicago’s offensive line saw ten players play at least 100 snaps while giving up a league-worst 68 sacks.
- Chicago cycled through two head coaches and three offensive coordinators.
Through all this chaos, Caleb Williams somehow managed to start all 17 games, playing all but 13 offensive snaps, and threw for 3,541 yards, with 20 touchdowns to 6 interceptions. He even added 489 rushing yards, bringing him over 4,000 yards from scrimmage on the season. Pretty good, right?
Those are all volume numbers, but don’t say all that much about how well a player actually performed. In this series, we’re going to dive into Williams’ advanced statistical profile to see what he did well, where he struggled, and what insights we can glean about his future.
For now, let’s start with a first look at Williams’ main efficiency stats, which you can view in the table below. To put these numbers into context, Williams’ rank for each stat compared to 34 QBs with 250+ pass attempts is shown in parentheses, with the best, average, and worst of those 34 players shown as well. Values in the top 25% are highlighted in green, while those in the bottom 25% are highlighted in red.
A few thoughts:
- A quick glance shows a lot of red without much green. Williams’ volume stats look pretty solid, but he generally wasn’t efficient. He struggled to complete passes, gain yards, and throw touchdowns on a per-attempt basis.
- To look at it another way, Williams was 7th in the NFL in pass attempts, but 17th in passing yards and 15th in passing touchdowns.
- Two of those three struggles should not be a surprise. I found last offseason that almost all QBs have lower completion and touchdown rates than the NFL as a whole in their rookie season.
- Williams also took way too many sacks. Shockingly, his sack rate was not the worst in this sample (thanks Will Levis!), but he did lead the NFL in sacks taken by a significant margin; Williams was sacked 68 times, while the next highest was CJ Stroud at 52.
- I’ll take a closer look at who was to blame for those sacks later on in the series.
- The one area where Williams excelled was in avoiding interceptions. After throwing four in his first three games, Williams had only two more passes picked off throughout the rest of the season.
- In the process, he shattered the NFL rookie record for most passes without an interception, and it’s not like the team wasn’t trailing an awful lot.
- I want to take a minute to explain two of the all-encompassing stats you might not be familiar with:
- Success rate, with data from Pro Football Reference, is a measure of how often a dropback resulted in the offense gaining enough yards to be considered ahead of the chains (more detailed explanation here). This is a measure of consistency.
- EPA, or expected points added, has data from RBSDM and measures how many expected points each dropback added based on the down and distance before and after the play (more detailed explanation here). This is quickly becoming one of the main metrics used to evaluate overall play and player value.
- Caleb finished 31st of 34 passers in both of these metrics, which suggests he was one of the worst QBs in the NFL in his rookie season.
- This shouldn’t be a huge cause for alarm. Rookie QBs are usually bad, and that generally doesn’t tell us very much about their future.
- Instead, I wanted to hammer this point home because it’s the main foundation for this series. Caleb Williams, by and large, was not very good in 2024. That runs counter to many fan narratives, but it’s the truth.
- This series, then, will focus on what areas specifically Williams struggled in to see where improvement is most needed in 2025 and beyond.
Looking Ahead
So that’s our first glance. Overall, Caleb Williams had solid volume stats in his rookie season but was one of the least efficient QBs in the NFL by most metrics.
Throughout the rest of this series, we’ll look more in-depth at specific parts of his game. Here’s what’s coming up in each article:
- Volume II: Where and how effectively Williams threw the ball
- Volume III: How Williams did on different types of plays (play action, quick vs. slow developing)
- Volume IV: How often Williams was under pressure, and who was to blame
- Volume V: How Williams performed under pressure
- Volume VI: How Williams did against man and zone
- Volume VII: How much did Williams improve throughout his rookie season?
