Caleb Williams Outpaces Jayden Daniels, Drake Maye in Yet Another Important Stat

Chicago Bears quarterback Caleb Williams thrilled the NFL world with a breakout sophomore season in 2025, setting an NFL record for the most fourth quarter comebacks by a quarterback younger than 25 years old in the process. He still has plenty of things to work on, with head coach Ben Johnson making Williams' accuracy a focal point of OTA practices, but there's no denying that he's already on the cusp of superstardom.

After just two years, Caleb Williams has proven to be better than even Patrick Mahomes in one important stat, and now we know that he's outpacing the rest of his highly regarded 2024 draft class in another: scrambling. Daire Carragher of PFF ranked the NFL's best scrambling quarterbacks using PFF data from the last three seasons, and despite playing in just two of those years, Williams checked in at No. 4 with a 92.5 scrambling grade. This put him ahead of Jayden Daniels, who took the No. 5 spot with a 92.1 grade, and ahead of Drake Maye.

Caleb Williams turned a weakness into an elite strength

As impressive as Williams' scrambling grade is in a vacuum, it becomes even more fantastic when one considers his rookie season. In 2024, Williams set a Chicago Bears record by taking 68 sacks in a season. Granted, much of the blame for those sacks fell on the shoulders of a bad offensive line, but Williams didn't do himself many favors. He held the ball too long, didn't take checkdowns or throw the ball away, and seemed surprised by the speed and arm-length of NFL defenders.

After just one offseason with a competent coaching staff, however, Williams took his biggest weakness and made it an elite strength. In 2025, Williams' sack total fell by nearly two-thirds, from 68 to just 24. In a mirrored reflection of their 2024 performance, the Bears' revamped offensive line deserves a lot of credit for the reduction in sacks, but Williams takes the lion's share.

Williams' Harry Houdini-like escapes became commonplace, and he began to show that he can take the easy plays in front of him. Gone were the ill-advised throws into triple coverage or taking unnecessary sacks. In their place, Williams was picking up first downs with his legs, hitting his checkdowns, or simply heaving the ball into the stands, incomplete but safe.

Can Caleb Williams finally cement his place atop the 2024 quarterback class?

Despite being the first-overall pick of the 2024 NFL draft, Williams is the only one of the top three quarterbacks from that class without any hardware. Jayden Daniels was the Offensive Rookie of the Year. Drake Maye won an All-Pro award in 2025 and finished as the runner-up in the MVP race. This has led to widespread speculation that Williams was the wrong choice for Chicago.

But the underlying stats tell a different story. As aforementioned, Williams took his biggest weaknesses as a rookie and turned these into a strength in just one year. Daniels, on the other hand, regressed quite a bit from his electrick debut campaign, even before he was sidelined by injuries. As for Maye, the Patriots played one of the easiest schedules in NFL history last year, making him a prime regression candidate in Year 3.

That's what makes Williams different. His major turnaround from a disastrous rookie campaign to an ascendant sophomore season serves as evidence that the best is yet to come. In fact, he's closer to being the 2026 MVP than his critics want to admit, a feat that would put to bed any talk of Williams being the wrong pick for the Bears.

This would require another astronomical jump forward in his development, but Williams hasn't given us any reason to believe that such a jump is beyond him.

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