This is the 3rd in a 6-part series examining Caleb Williams’ 2025 season.
Today, we’ll continue diving deeper into Williams’ statistics profile to try and figure out how well he performed in a few different play types.
Let’s start by looking at how Caleb Williams did on play-action drop backs compared to standard passing plays. Before I present the full data, I want to briefly explain two PFF stats that will be used:
Both of these stats will admittedly have some subjectivity, but they provide a useful glimpse into how frequently a QB makes a really good play vs. a really bad one.
The table below shows how Williams performed in a wide variety of statistics in play action (orange) vs. other dropbacks (blue), and also includes Williams’ rank (in parentheses) out of 32 total NFL QBs who had at least 250 pass attempts. Information on the spread of all NFL QBs is also provided for each stat. Cells highlighted in green indicate Williams was among the top 25% of QBs in this category, while those in red indicate Williams was in the bottom 25% of QBs. 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.)
Let’s look now at a different way to split a QB’s pass attempts, based on how long it took him to throw the ball. PFF splits this into less than 2.5 seconds and more than 2.5 seconds.
There’s going to be some overlap with the play action data here, as the time to throw is generally longer on play action than other plays (average 3.2 vs. 2.7 seconds, as shown in the table above). So, we might expect to see some of the similar trends as above, but this is still a different enough way of parsing the sample that some results might be unique.
The table below shows the same stats as the play action one above. Once again, Williams’ data is shown ranked out of the 32 QB sample, information is provided about the spread of the 32 QBs, and cells for Williams’ stats in green or red represent Williams ranking in the top 25% or bottom 25%, respectively.
In case you got lost in all the numbers above, here are today’s main takeaways: