Bear Digest

Caleb Williams is having a better year than you think, and this stat proves it

Caleb Williams is inching closer to Bears history, but he should've already been there.
Bryan Perez|
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Chicago Bears QB Caleb Williams is on a quest to become the first quarterback in team history to throw for more than 4,000 yards in one season. With one game remaining in 2025, Williams is 270 yards shy of the ever-elusive 4K threshold.

However, a deeper dive into Williams' season suggest he should already be in the 4,000-yard club.

According to Next Gen Stats, Williams leads the NFL in the most passing yards lost due to drops.

Yep, Caleb Williams should already be at 4,100 passing yards with one game left to play.

Indeed, it's unreasonable to expect pass-catchers to make good on every target. Drops are part of the game, and the list of QBs who've lost yards due to drops includes players like Matthew Stafford, Dak Prescott, and Justin Herbert.

Those guys are pretty darn good.

And, remember: even if Williams falls short of 4,000 passing yards this week, he could still set a new Chicago Bears single-season record. He needs just 109 yards against the Lions to get there.

Now, that's a number -- 109 yards -- that could've reasonably been secured already had his wideouts held onto a few of those passes.

Still, the bigger point here is that Williams is developing into the exact kind of quarterback that the Bears hoped he'd be. He's already led this team to a division championship and playoff berth in just his second season. And if he sets a franchise record for passing yards and becomes the first guy to top 4,000 yards? That's icing on the cake.

Bears offensive coordinator Declan Doyle helped shed some light on one area of Caleb Williams' growth in 2025.

"You see a guy who is more in command, as far as when he's up there, and utilizing the cadence to an advantage," Doyle said. "We talked about that a lot when we first got here, just our cadence being something that we wanted to kind of hang our hat on, and it helps you in a lot of different ways, being under center, and your guys being able to come off the ball and get a little bit of an edge just because the quarterback's cadence is consistent."

It's that kind of development that led to Colston Loveland's big touchdown catch against the 49ers.

"That was an instance of we're kind of in a mode of trying to get them to see if we can jump, and then we'll get to the play we're going to run," Doyle said. "Just so happens that they jump. That's a situation that we practice quite frequently. But really, they jump. we pulled the trigger at center. We did a great job of protecting and really flipping into that protection that we needed to handle. He did a good job of working out there, and then Loveland able to separate, and we create a big play down the field. We create a touchdown, and it's really all off of his cadence.”

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Bryan Perez
BRYAN PEREZ

Bryan Perez founded and operated Bears Talk, a Chicago sports blog. Prior to that, he covered the Bears for USA Today’s Bears Wire and NBC Sports Chicago. In addition to his Chicago Bears coverage, Perez is a respected member of NFL Draft media and was a past winner of The Huddle's Mock Draft competition. Bryan's past life includes time as a Northeast scout for the CFL's Ottawa Redblacks.

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