Pro Football Focus had a rough time with Caleb Williams in Week 1, and the reaction showed it.
After Williams helped the Chicago Bears put up 59 points in a season-opening win over the Carolina Panthers, PFF handed him the 20th-highest quarterback grade of the week. That put him in a tier that had plenty of Bears fans questioning the whole process, especially with some of the week’s top quarterback performances grading out well above him.
The disconnect was jarring because Williams’ stat line was anything but quiet. He finished with 334 yards and four total touchdowns, yet PFF still treated the outing like something closer to ordinary than explosive.
On a play-by-play basis, that’s where the grading philosophy starts to matter. PFF scores every snap from -2 to +2, with the harshest marks reserved for major mistakes and the highest grades handed out only rarely.
By that standard, Williams’ performance came out far more muted than the box score suggested.
Of his 40 dropbacks against Carolina, 23 were graded as “0” and eight landed at +0.5. That means more than three-quarters of his work was viewed as either routine or only a little above that. Even the plays that popped on the field weren’t always getting much love in the grading column.
One moment in particular dragged the score down: a would-be fourth-quarter interception at the goal line with Chicago leading 45-31. The play was wiped out by a penalty, but PFF still dinged Williams for the decision.
That approach raises obvious questions about how the system handles penalty-affected plays. If a penalty can alter the outcome of a bad throw, how much should it matter in the final grade?
PFF answered that one its own way, and Williams paid for it.
The grading also left little room for what Williams does best with his legs. His scrambles, according to the charting, were either expected or not especially impressive.
That’s part of the larger issue with a quarterback whose game is built on improvisation and chaos. Williams can create throws from awkward angles, extend plays, and bend defenses in ways that don’t always fit neatly into a rigid formula.
PFF also credited him with accuracy on just 53.8% of his throws, which ranked 24th in the league, even though he completed 72% of his passes against Carolina. On top of that, 27% of his throws were labeled “catchable but inaccurate.” That language gets to the heart of the problem: the terms are fuzzy, and the line between “catchable” and “accurate” is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
There’s also the simple reality that Williams is not built to be a pure precision machine. He’s not going to win by playing the kind of surgical, quick-release football that PFF seems to reward most heavily.
He’s a Maserati. You don't take the Maserati to the in-laws' place for a baptism party.
That doesn’t mean the Bears quarterback gets a pass if his habits go sideways later. If he starts slipping and carrying over bad traits from his rookie year, he should absolutely be judged for it. But on a day when Chicago scored 60 points, the basic football read is still hard to ignore: Williams probably played better than the grading said he did.
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