Caleb Williams Made Some Throws

Preseason games can’t tell you too much about how a rookie quarterback is ultimately going to pan out, but they can offer up moments that are worth underlining. In his second preseason game, No. 1 overall pick Caleb Williams yielded a few such moments to entice Bears fans.

The first arrived in the second quarter. On second-and-10, Williams took a shotgun snap and scrambled to his left to avoid pressure. With his momentum carrying him towards the sideline, Williams turned his shoulders back upfield and launched a one-legged pass up the sideline that dropped right into fellow rookie Rome Odunze’s hands for a 45-yard gain:

The second moment only showed up as an incomplete pass in the box score, but was perhaps just as impressive as the completion to Odunze. Running a boot leg to his right, Williams found himself in a 1-on-1 situation with a defender in space. A quick hesitation bought him a few more yards of space to run into towards the sideline, and just before he stepped out of bounds he threw a bullet to the back corner of the end zone. The ball was caught by Odunze, and was only counted as an incompletion because the wideout didn’t get his feet sorted out:

In the Patrick Mahomes era, NFL quarterbacks are increasingly separated by what types of throws they can and cannot make. Arm strength, mobility, and vision are all individually important, but what matters now, more than it ever has before, is how well a quarterback can use them all at once. The guys who can do that can make throws, and the guys who can’t usually end up with clipboards in their hands.

The kind of throws that Williams made on Saturday are what earned him some whispered comparisons to Mahomes while he was in college. As if aware of the fact that Williams’s second preseason performance might turn up the volume on those whispers, Mahomes went out in his own preseason game and unleashed a whole new type of throw for us to gaze at:

Williams will have to work on that one.