Quarterback comparison: Justin Fields vs. Caleb Williams

CHICAGO — It’s a debate that’s been raging for months, and will only pick up steam as April comes closer and closer. Should the Chicago Bears stick with Justin Fields at quarterback, or draft a new franchise cornerstone in Caleb Williams?

According to Bears general manager Ryan Poles and head coach Matt Eberflus’ comments at the NFL Scouting Combine in Indianapolis, the tea leaves appear to read Chicago will move on from Fields, trading him to another place where he can compete for a starting job — Perhaps as soon as before the beginning of free agency on March 13.

But until that hypothetical trade goes down, the debate remains — Fields or Williams?

Let’s take a look at each and how their careers compared coming out of college heading into the NFL Draft.

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Justin Fields

Measurements:

Height: 6’3″

Weight: 228 lbs.

Hands: 9 1/8″

Arm: 32 1/2″

40-yard dash: 4.45

Coming out of Ohio State after the 2020 college football season, Fields wasn’t labeled a generational prospect like Williams, but his stock came with a surefire first round grade.

NFL.com gave Fields a prospect grade of 6.45 on a scale of 1-8, which equated to their NFL draft experts believing he would become a good starter in the league within two years of being drafted.

According to Next Gen Stats in the same scouting report, among QB’s in the 2021 draft class, Fields received a 92 production score (4th), 93 athleticism score (1st) and a total score of 89 (2nd).

NFLDraftBuzz.com gave Fields an overall prospect rating of 92.1/100 coming out of college, which ranks higher in their database than the No. 2 and No. 3 quarterbacks in this year’s draft class — Drake Maye (91.6) and Jayden Daniels (90.5).

A data study by Pro Football Focus in 2021 even said Fields was the most accurate passer they had ever tracked up until that point, via the statistic “completion percentage over expected” (CPOE), going back to the 2014 season.

CPOE is a metric that uses seven differently-weighted variables (Pass depth, target yard-line, pressure, target width, down, RPO and blitz) to rate a quarterback’s accuracy based on the likelihood of them completing a pass in the given circumstances and whether they actually completed the pass.

Under this metric, Fields outperformed contemporaries like Baker Mayfield, Joe Burrow, Trevor Lawrence, Jared Goff, Josh Allen, Patrick Mahomes, Justin Herbert and Lamar Jackson in college.

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This accompanied traditional stats that contributed toward the sentiment Fields was a pristine quarterback prospect.

In 22 games spanning across his sophomore and junior campaigns as a Buckeye, Fields completed 396 of 579 passes (68.4%) for 5,373 yards, 63 touchdowns and 9 interceptions through the air.

On the ground, Fields carried the ball 218 times for 867 yards (4.0 YPC) and 15 touchdowns over the same timeframe.

On a per game basis, that comes out to 242.2 passing yards and 2.9 passing touchdowns per game, with 39.4 rushing yards and 0.7 rushing touchdowns per contest.

A prevailing narrative that has plagued Fields since joining the ranks of NFL quarterbacks has been the conversation around his average time to throw, or TTT for short, and the writing was on the wall coming out of college.

Robert Schmitz and Kyle Morris over at DaBearsBlog.com recently put together a great piece breaking down Williams’ TTT while at USC (a whopping 3.27 seconds) in comparison to Fields while he was at Ohio State (3.14 seconds).

When looking back at Fields during his Buckeye playing days, Fields’ physical gifts and statistical outputs painted a picture of a big, highly-mobile quarterback that paired a rocket arm with a knack for deep ball accuracy.

Scouts and analysts envisioned 60-yard frozen ropes interweaved with dazzling 30-yard scrambles, leaving defenses flummoxed and flabbergasted.

But hindsight being 20-20, scouts, analysts and experts would have been better off not getting lost in what happens after the throw, and remembering to take a look at what happens before the ball is released.

Go ahead and give the article a read to get the full picture, but the gist of the piece from the angle of Fields is that he struggled to throw with anticipation at times, leading to him holding onto the ball too long and using his legs to escape pressure and collect rush yards (or sacks), in favor of going through his progressions and making an on-time, accurate throw.

Sorry if you’ve heard that one before Bears fans.

His TTT was 110th out of 114 QB’s tracked since 2014. Tied in with how often Fields turned pressures into sacks — 23.6% of the time, 103rd out of the same 114 QB sample size — more weight should have been given toward Fields’ pre-throw tape.

Morris created a spreadsheet that compared other three-plus second TTT quarterbacks who were also drafted in the first three rounds since 2020, sorted by how often they scrambled in college and the NFL.

In college, Fields also scrambled from a clean pocket 8.2% of the time — a number that has carried over into the NFL, with Fields scrambling from a clean pocket 7.8% of the time — And both of those numbers are more than two-and-a-half times higher than Williams’ scramble rate from a clean pocket last year in college (3.0%), lending credence toward Fields not being able to process plays to the same level of quickness as Williams, and choosing to rely on his legs more as a safety net.

More on Morris and Schmitz’s breakdown of Williams’ TTT below.

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Caleb Williams

Measurements

Height: 6’1″

Weight: 214 lbs.

Hands: 9 3/4″

Arm: 32″

40-yard dash: 4.59***

Where do you start when trying to encapsulate the college career of Caleb Williams?

As many already know — and if you didn’t already — Williams has been preparing to become an NFL quarterback since the age of ten.

A Sept. 2023 profile by GQ detailed his meticulous dedication toward chasing the dream of becoming an NFL quarterback from a young age.

Hot yoga and media training that started by high school. Summers spent crisscrossing the United States to work with the country’s best quarterback coaches. Temperature-controlled naps and nutritionists to guide eating habits. The whole nine yards.

All of the intensive preparation led him to the University of Oklahoma as the top high school quarterback prospect in the country. A 66-yard scamper on his first play freshman year against the Sooner’s bitter border rival, Texas, ignited his stardom, and after his head coach and quarterbacks guru Lincoln Riley departed for USC, Williams followed suit and flew to the West Coast, where he went on to win a Heisman trophy after his sophomore season.

A year later, Williams added even more dazzling plays to his highlight reel and then did what was expected — declare for the NFL Draft.

In two years at USC, Williams completed 599 of 688 passes (67.5%) for 8,170 yards, 72 touchdowns and 10 interceptions, to go with 210 carries for 524 yards (2.5 YPC) and 21 touchdowns on the ground.

This included his Heisman trophy campaign, where he completed 333 of 500 passes for 4,537 yards, 42 touchdowns, 5 interceptions, and ran the ball 113 times for 382 yards and 10 touchdowns in 2022.

For the sake of comparing 22-game samples to end their college careers, Williams completed 519 of 766 passes (67.75%) over his last 22 games as a Trojan, throwing for 7,116 yards, 63 touchdowns (the exact same number of touchdown passes as Fields over the same timeframe, for those keeping score at home) and 10 interceptions.

On the ground, he ran the ball 174 times for 424 yards (2.44 YPC) and 19 touchdowns.

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On a per game basis, that comes out to 323.5 passing yards and 2.9 passing touchdowns per game, with 19.3 rushing yards and 0.9 rushing touchdowns per contest.

According to NFLDraftBuzz.com, Williams is their highest rated quarterback prospect in this draft cycle (93.5/100), and ranks ahead of past contemporaries in their database like C.J. Stroud (92.0), Fields (92.1) and Zach Wilson (91.6), but is also behind the likes of Trevor Lawrence (95.0) and Bryce Young (93.6).

In his press conference addressing the media at the beginning of this year’s NFL combine, Bears general manager Ryan Poles acknowledged the NFL comparison many have lauded for the former USC Trojan — Patrick Mahomes.

“There’s pieces that are similar. Obviously the one that stands out to everyone is just different arm angles. That’s a unique trait, not a lot of guys can do that,” Poles said on seeing the comparison between Williams and Mahomes. “I’ll give Jeff King, he’s on my [scouting] team, credit. He painted a picture — there’s two types of quarterbacks. There’s artists and then there’s surgeons.

“Within that group, you can kind of see who’s the artist that’s really creative and doesn’t draw within the lines. Where there’s more of surgeons, like your typical [Tom] Brady’s and Peyton [Mannings].”

Kliff Kingsbury — Williams’ quarterbacks coach at USC, and Mahomes’ offensive coordinator at Texas Tech — threw even more gas on the fire when he said it’s “eerie how similar” the two quarterbacks are.

Remember how I mentioned Williams’ TTT was longer than Fields’ TTT earlier?

Williams’s TTT ranked dead last among the 114 QB’s tracked since 2014, but his pressure to sack rate was slightly better than Fields (19.4% compared to 23.6%).

At the end of the day though, Mahomes has a 11.3% pressure to sack rate and a TTT of 2.81 seconds. So, what skews Williams’ pressure to sack rate and TTT so far away from Mahomes, despite the constant comparisons between the two?

According to Morris, Pro Football Focus showed Williams had an average TTT almost a full second longer than almost any other college quarterback on scrambles (6.58 seconds in 2023), and rarely did those scrambles actually result in him running the football.

In the same spreadsheet mentioned earlier, Williams led the pack in lowest % of scrambles from a clean pocket (3.0%), pressured dropbacks ending in a scramble (12.4%) and overall dropbacks ending in a scramble (6.2%), while those scrambles lasted — on average — 0.89 to 1.69 seconds longer.

Essentially, Williams is fiercely determined to use his legs to create as much time as possible to make a play with his arm, which according to Morris, makes him more comparable to Aaron Rodgers than Mahomes.

Williams — like Rodgers — possesses an elite ability to process plays quickly, but that’s also paired with a rogue-ish arrogance that leads to him holding onto the ball longer than most quarterbacks, which often results in those six-plus second, backbreaking highlight throws that have been so commonplace from Rodgers over the years, with a sprinkle of sacks and fumbles mixed in along the way.

Morris then found Rodgers’ most comparable season to 2023 Caleb Williams and the numbers backed up his comparison. In 2016, Rodgers had a 4.3% scramble rate from a clean pocket (Williams: 3.0%), 8.7% pressured scramble rate (Williams: 12.4%), a 5.7% overall scramble rate (Williams: 6.2%), and an average scramble time of 6.44 (Williams: 6.58) to go with a pressure to sack rate of 17.9% (Williams: 19.4%)

For those curious what Rodgers counting stats were that year, he completed 401 of 610 passes for 4,428 yards, a league-leading 40 touchdown passes and 7 interceptions — Numbers a Bears quarterback has never come close to producing.

USC’s pro day is scheduled to take place on March 20, while the NFL Draft is set to take place in Detroit from April 25-27.

***Caleb Williams 40-yard dash time was taken from NFLDraftBuzz.com’s database and has yet to be compared to his 40-yard dash time at USC’s pro day, should Williams chose to run the exercise then.

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