The Bear Claw had to take a hiatus after being absolutely blown away by Caleb Williams 18 snaps in the Buffalo Bills preseason game. Can we just crown this guy king of the NFC North already? Jokes aside, Caleb did perform well and it has been hard not to be too excited.
The puzzling part of Williams' preseason debut was the lack of passing. Out of his 18 snaps, less than half were passes - 7 total to be exact. Of those 7 passes, 4 were completions. In total we saw 95 passing yards. I thought we would see a lot more passing from Williams. The haters up north will probably claim that Caleb is a bust and he can't read an offense like Fields. I would argue that this is a new offense from top to bottom (as I have said exhaustively in previous columns) and this is preseason. I do not care about the stats from one preseason game, for instance - most of the passing yards cam from yards-after-carry. Without mentioning this, that 95 yards seemed a lot more impressive. Or maybe it is still impressive, but it does not matter. How many times have we seen the Ravens coronated as preseason champions only to fizzle out in the regular season?
When I watched that game I was looking for the intangibles. Sometimes you need less stats and nerds on your payroll and more "gut feeling" guys (looking at you baseball). What I saw was a QB who was comfortable in the pocket. I never saw that with Fields, I thought he was always panicking. I also saw a QB who was able to roll out if needed and extend plays. There were multiple times where Caleb extending the play and got some yards via passing or running, plays that would have gotten Fields sacked for a loss of 10 yards.
Statistics are misleading this time of the year. I opened up X after the game and under every post glazing Caleb Williams' stats was a picture of a Fields preseason game where he had 3 completions on 3 attempts for 129 yards and 2 touchdowns. I'm not saying statistics aren't useful. During the regular season I think certain ones can be useful. I don't think giving Williams a 101 "passer rating" - a complete bullshit statistic - is saying he's "good". He went out, he threw the ball, he even handed off the ball, just like an NFL QB should.
I like Williams, I think his ceiling is high and I liked seeing a glimpse of his play style on Saturday. It was a tease that will be all too annoying this upcoming game against Cincinnati because the Bengals have announced they are sitting their starters. I would be surprised if Williams plays. Other notes: the defense looked really good, especially rookie Austin Booker who had 2.5 sacks (ok some stats are useful in preseason). This was more of an opinion piece. If you want stats and performance grades then I recommend checking out the Bears official site here.
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