It’s been two seasons since the Chicago Bears selected Caleb Williams with the No. 1 overall pick in the 2024 NFL Draft. Remember, they didn’t have to take him. Chicago had just traded up to select Ohio State quarterback Justin Fields with the 11th overall pick in 2021.
Nevertheless, they traded Fields and moved forward with Williams as the franchise QB. The move paid near-immediate dividends, with Williams leading the team to its first playoff win since 2010 in his second season. Meanwhile, Fields hasn’t won more than six games since the trade, and he’s now on his fourth NFL team.
As for Williams, after leading the NFL with 68 sacks taken, he took a major leap forward in just one season under Ben Johnson, and the former first-round QB looks like a superstar in the making. But he’s far from a finished product.
Is Caleb Williams Too Erratic and Immature?
While the Bears’ QB improved sharply from Year 1 to Year 2, helping the Bears go from a 5-12 team to one that finished with an 11-6 record in 2025, there were some areas he may have actually gotten worse in.
For example, Williams’ completion rate actually got worse from one year to the next. As a rookie, he completed 62.5% of his passes. Last year? Williams’ completion rate dropped to 58.1%, the lowest mark in the NFL among QBs who started all 17 games.
Recently, ESPN conducted a poll of NFL executives, coaches, and scouts, asking them to rank the league’s best quarterbacks. While doing so, an NFL coach had something interesting to say about Williams’ accuracy and maturity level.
“Wildly erratic,” a veteran NFL defensive coach said. “Doesn’t always take the layups and still needs to mature into the position. [He] has some of those ‘what is he doing?’ plays. But he also makes plays only he and Mahomes can make. [He] can throw from any angle, deceptively fast when forced to scramble and he’s got the ‘it’ factor in crunch time.”
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Oofta. That’s pretty harsh. But not unfair.
Williams is just 24 years old. The player he is today is not the one who arrived in the NFL two seasons ago. Heck, the player he’ll be by the end of the season won’t be the same one who will be entering battle in Week 1. This is a young QB who will continue to improve, especially as he gains more reps in coach Johnson’s offense, alongside his talented cast of pass-catchers.
He’s only going to improve in time. Maturity? People make mistakes; they learn from them and grow up. Williams will get there too.
