Evan Williams has gone from promising young piece to a player Green Bay can count on every week, and the numbers are starting to shout it from the rooftops.
Xavier McKinney may still grab more of the attention in Green Bay, but it’s Williams, now in his third season, who is forcing his way into the conversation as one of the NFL’s top safeties. The 25-year-old, who came out of Oregon and Fresno State, locked down a starting role in his second year as a pro and has taken off through the first eight games of this Packers season.
His latest work came in the Packers’ Thursday Night beatdown of Bryce Young and the Carolina Panthers, and his season line now looks like this: 44 solo tackles, 71 combined tackles, six pass deflections, four quarterback hits, two interceptions, two tackles for loss, and a fumble recovery. That production only tells part of the story, because Williams has been just as valuable in coverage, where he’s erased receivers and helped prevent the kind of explosive plays that slip past Green Bay’s front.
The tape has impressed. The stat sheet has backed it up.
And now the analytics are lining up with both. Among the 94 players qualified for PFF’s safety rankings, Williams is sitting at No. 1 in the NFL, ahead of names like Seattle’s Julian Love, Atlanta’s Jessie Bates, Baltimore’s Kyle Hamilton, and New York’s Minkah Fitzpatrick.
Green Bay has seen this coming since it drafted Williams in the fourth round of the 2024 Draft, but the rest of the league is now catching up to what he can do.
His rise has also fit neatly into the broader lift this Packers defense has shown under Defensive Coordinator Jonathan Gannon, who took over early this year. After the win over Carolina, Williams told reporters like WDUZ’s Marques Eversoll that "he trusts us to win, and when you feel that type of trust from a coordinator going into a game, it allows you to play free."
That freedom has shown up in the way Williams is playing: loose, fast, and driven by instinct. The result has been a safety who is making himself impossible to ignore on a defense already loaded with talent.
Opponents have felt it, too. Quarterbacks are posting a 44.7 passer rating when targeting Williams in coverage, a brutal number that matches the eye test and confirms what Green Bay has been seeing for weeks.
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