General Overview
Let’s start with a general look at how Williams performed against man and zone coverage in 2024. All data comes from Pro Football Focus (PFF) unless otherwise noted.
Before we get into the data, a quick caveat: PFF doesn’t publicly show this data by QB, but instead by pass catcher. I manually compiled it team by team to do comparisons, but it doesn’t include all throws. This accounts for a little over 80% of Williams’ total pass attempts; it for sure does not include throwaways with no pass target (which PFF says were about 10% of Caleb’s throws), and I would imagine also does not include some screens where the play developed too quickly to determine the coverage.
With that said, the table below shows how Williams fared throwing against both man and zone compared to the NFL average (I couldn’t do the usual NFL high/medium/low since this wasn’t split up by QB).
(If you can’t view the full figure, click on it to open in a new tab. Sorry about formatting issues.)
A few thoughts:
- Williams struggled mightily throwing the ball against man coverage, which makes sense given his downfield accuracy issues. These are usually deeper passes, as evidenced by the higher air yards per catch mark, and Williams struggled to hit those passes in 2024. As a result, his completion percentage and yards per attempt were both significantly lower than NFL averages.
- Man coverage also tends to have pretty high rates of touchdown passes allowed, largely because this gets used more near the goal line, but also can leave you more exposed to giving up a big play. Caleb’s touchdown rate against man coverage was much lower than NFL averages, which accounts for his lower overall touchdown rate than NFL norms in his rookie season that we noted in part 1.
- On the flip side, Williams was relatively better against zone. His completion percentage here was right around NFL average, and his yards per attempt mark, while still not good, was less bad relative to his peers than against man coverage.
- He also threw touchdowns at a similar rate as his peers while doing a great job of avoiding interceptions, which are generally more common against zone coverage due to extra defenders lurking with eyes on the quarterback.
Positional Split – Man
Let’s look now at how Williams did throwing to various positions against both man and zone, starting with man coverage. The table below shows how frequently and effectively Williams threw to running backs, wide receivers, and tight ends when the opposing defense was in man.
A few thoughts:
- WRs generally see a higher target share against man than zone, but Williams especially loved throwing to his WRs here, at the expense of RBs at TEs. This makes some sense given that the Bears had three high-target WRs, but they also had pretty good pass catching options at RB (D’Andre Swift) and TE (Cole Kmet).
- Given the high target volume, it really hurts how inefficient passes to the WRs were. 51% completion and 5.9 yards/attempt is simply not good enough.
- This is likely due in no small part to Williams’ accuracy issues, but there’s also no denying that Chicago’s WR trio was not nearly as good as anticipated in 2024. DJ Moore and Keenan Allen both saw their PFF grades drop by over 15 points from 2023 to 2024, which theoretically should be independent of QB play.
- TE throws had a high completion percentage but low yards/target, mainly because they were only able to get short passes against man coverage. This is on the TEs, not Caleb Williams, because both Cole Kmet and Gerald Everett struggled mightily against man coverage with different QBs in 2023.
- It’s hard to put too much stock in such a small sample, but passes to the RBs were generally quite effective and maybe could have been utilized a bit more. I would say it’s mainly because this highlights D’Andre Swifts’ biggest strength, which is playing in space. Man coverage means he can often make one defender – likely a LB – miss in the open field and then break a decent gain.
- Just because I was curious, I looked at Detroit’s offense last year to see what new head coach Ben Johnson’s offense looked like. I don’t think efficiency matters much there since the personnel will be completely different, but I wanted to know how the targets split up.
- Against man coverage, the Lions aimed 17% of passes at RBs, 60% at WR, and 23% at TEs.
- This is pretty much the opposite from Chicago in 2024, where the Lions targeted RB and TE against man coverage more frequently than the NFL average, and that feels pretty notable considering they had two highly productive WRs they could have gone to.
- In 2023, the data looked very different, with 11% of man targets going to RB, 63% WR, and 27% TE. Here the TE was really high, WR low, and RB around average.
- 2022 saw a man target split right around average, with 12% going to RB, 73% to WR, and 15% to TE.
- These highly different trends across three years suggest Ben Johnson will mold his offense to his personnel. When he added TE Sam LaPorta, who is capable of beating man coverage, in 2023, the offense utilized him, and TE targets against man spiked. We likewise saw RB targets spike in 2024 as Jahmyr Gibbs saw his role increase (he accounted for all but 2 of the RB man targets).
- Based on this, I don’t actually think we can predict how Chicago’s offense will attack man defenses in 2025, because Johnson has shown he will customize it to his personnel.
Positional Split – Zone
Let’s shift now to looking at how Williams fared against zone coverage. The table below matches the one for man above but is zone stats.
A few thoughts:
- Once again, we see a significantly higher rate of passes aimed at WRs than the NFL average.
- In this case, the RB target rate was around average, but TEs were utilized significantly less often than average.
- I am guessing the Bears planned to utilize TEs more in their passing game, but those plans went out the window when it became clear Gerald Everett was washed up and got quickly phased out of the offense. Everett saw 10 of his 13 targets in the first 7 games.
- For the life of me, I can’t figure out why the Bears didn’t use Cole Kmet more in the passing game in 2024. Out of the five players with 50+ targets in 2024, Kmet ranked 1st in catch rate (86%, nobody else above 81%), yards/target (8.6, nobody else above 7.4), and success rate (71%, nobody else above 52%). He likely would have seen his efficiency slip a bit with a higher volume, but it was worth giving him a bit more volume to see how much the efficiency could have been maintained.
- In this case, the RB target rate was around average, but TEs were utilized significantly less often than average.
- Looking at efficiency, we once again see that the passes to WRs were ineffective, with a yards/attempt mark well below the NFL average. Once again, I attribute this to a combination of Williams’ accuracy issues and the WRs not playing up to their expected levels.
- Unlike against man coverage, we see that zone passes to RBs and TEs were both fairly effective, coming in above NFL averages in both catch rate and yards per attempt.
- As discussed above, Kmet was Chicago’s most efficient pass catcher in 2024, and virtually all of his usage came against zone.
- Chicago’s 2nd most efficient pass catcher was RB D’Andre Swift, who accounted for the bulk of his targets here. Swift saw 70 pass targets under Ben Johnson’s tutelage in 2022, most of which came against zone, so I anticipate we’ll see him remain fairly involved in the passing game in 2025.
- Looking at Ben Johnson’s history in Detroit, we again see a target distribution against zone coverage that changes by year in response to personnel.
- 2022: 26% to RB, 60% to WR, 14% to TE
- 2023: 17% to RB, 59% to WR, 24% to TE
- 2024: 24% to RB, 58% to WR, 18% to TE
- Once again, I don’t think there are conclusions to draw there about Chicago in 2025. Pass distribution rates will vary based on the quality of the personnel available to them.
Lessons Learned
- Caleb Williams struggled mightily against man coverage in 2024 but was actually pretty solid against zone.
- Against both man and zone, Williams targeted WRs more heavily than his NFL counterparts, but struggled mightily throwing to WRs.
- The passes that did get targeted to RB were generally quite effective, which is a testament to D’Andre Swift, and passes to TEs were effective against zone but not man, in keeping with Cole Kmet’s production history.
- Ben Johnson has shown that target distributions in his offense vary quite a bit from year to year depending on the personnel available to him, so it’s hard to predict what this will look like with entirely new personnel in Chicago.
