Caleb’s Close-Up: Volume II, Where He Threw the Football

Yesterday we saw that Caleb Williams generally struggled as a passer during his rookie season. Today we’re going to dive deeper into those stats to see if we can figure out where it all went wrong.

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 34 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 target frequency, Williams generally threw it behind the line of scrimmage and deep at pretty high rates, and threw to the short and medium depths less often than his peers.
- Williams was known as a QB who liked to go big-play hunting coming out of college, and we see that here in the high rate of deep passes.
- Behind the line of scrimmage passes are mostly schemed up, which reflects more on the offensive play caller than the QB.
- The short and middle zones are going to be areas that have more defenders, so this may have been a case of a rookie QB trying to avoid putting the ball in harms’ way as he adjusted to the speed of the NFL. As we noted in part 1, the one thing Williams did consistently well in 2024 was not throw interceptions.
In terms of effectiveness, there is a sizable shift between throws under 10 yards past the line of scrimmage (behind the line of scrimmage and short) vs. those 10+ yards downfield (medium and deep). Williams was quite good on the shorter stuff, but absolutely awful trying to push the ball downfield.
- The short passes being good bodes well for the future, as these make up the majority of throws and thus are a larger sample size that should generally be more stable year to year. After three years of watching Justin Fields routinely struggle with this “easy stuff,” it’s nice to see a QB that can make the routine plays.
- On the flip side, Williams absolutely cannot be this bad on downfield passes if he wants to be a successful NFL QB.
  - These struggles are a big change from Williams’ college production. In 2023, Williams ranked 5th of 52 FBS QBs with 50+ deep passes in accuracy rate (53%) and 2nd among the same sample with 20.3 yards/deep attempt. He was also above average in deep accuracy in 2022 (48%), his only other full season as a starter.
  - Deep ball accuracy was also widely viewed as one of Williams’ strengths going into the NFL draft. When I Googled “Caleb Williams scouting report,” 6 of the first 7 draft profiles specifically mentioned deep accuracy as a strength (PFF, Pro Football Network, Bleacher Report, NFL Draft Buzz, The Draft Network, and Sports Info Solutions). Only NFL.com’s Lance Zierlein mentioned any issues with deep ball accuracy.
- The good news is that Williams already showed in college that he can improve as a deep ball passer as he adjusts to a higher level of football.
  - In his freshman year at Oklahoma in 2021, Williams was accurate on 42% of deep passes and averaged 13 yards/attempt. This was compared to averages of 43% accuracy and 14 yards/attempt among FBS QBs with 50+ deep attempts, which meant Williams was a slightly below average deep passer in his first college season.
  - In his 2022 sophomore campaign, overall deep averages stayed consistent, but Williams improved to 48% accuracy and 16 yards/attempt, making him a solidly above-average deep passer (he ranked 14th and 8th of 57 QBs in those categories).
  - As mentioned above, Williams developed even further into an elite deep passer in his 3rd and final college season, ranking in the top five in both accuracy % and yards/attempt on deep passes.
- Williams will need to repeat that similar growth trajectory in the NFL to become a true franchise QB in the NFL.

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 34 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 center deep region represented only 18 Williams passes, which makes it hard to say if the improved accuracy there compared to deep passes outside the hashes is real or a small-sample size fluke.
Overall, there doesn’t seem to be much difference in where Williams targets left to right. 25% of his passes went to the left compared to 26% to the right.
It is worth noting that Williams generally avoided the middle part of the field in the short and medium distances, where defenders are most likely to be present. Only 28% of his passes went to these areas, compared to the NFL average of 32% (by comparison, 32% of his passes went short or medium outside the hashes, compared to NFL average of 30%).
- PFF has noted that it is typical for rookie QBs to avoid the middle of the field, which is typically where many of the highest efficiency throws can be made, and a big part of the improvement a QB makes from year one to year two comes from learning better how to attack this area.

Lessons Learned

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

Caleb Williams was effective throwing the ball short last year, but was a terrible deep ball passer. That will need to improve, and his track record throughout his three seasons in college suggests he can get better here as he grows more comfortable with the speed of the game.
Williams also needs to become more comfortable attacking the middle of the field, which is a common trend for young QBs in the NFL. Being able to do this effectively will naturally improve his efficiency as a passer.