Back in June, Ben Johnson and Caleb Williams openly talked about the goal of completing 70% of the quarterback’s passes in practice and, ultimately, in games.
Through the first 13 games of the 2025 regular season, Williams has not completed 70% of his passes in any game. His closest to that mark was in Chicago’s Week 3 win over the Dallas Cowboys. The second-year quarterback completed 19 of 28 passes for 298 yards and four touchdowns, finishing with a 67.9 completion percentage.
On the season, Williams is completing just 57.8% of his passes. That’s well below the initial goal that the Bears’ head coach and quarterback established.
What does Ben Johnson say about the continuous Caleb Williams accuracy issues?
There’s a multitude of reasons for that, but Johnson provided a reason during his press conference at Halas Hall.
“There's a lot of thinking going on for him right now,” Johnson said. “I was talking with the TV crew yesterday about this, since the bye week we've kind of – I don't want to say taken the training wheels off, but to a degree we've opened up with all these shifts and motions. We have more movement than we did in the first four games. When that happens, he's thinking a lot about making sure he's checking off all the boxes that he's got to check off before the snap. Because of that, the post snap play suffers a little bit.”
Williams having a bigger responsibility in Johnson’s offense, 13 games into Year 1, is a positive for the 24-year-old quarterback. There’s validity to what Johnson said on Friday.
The Bears’ head coach also mentioned that Williams handling all the presnap shifts and motions has directly correlated with the ascension of the Bears’ run game.
“It's something that we're going to continue to work through, and I think each week you continue to see improvement to where the post-snap play of our quarterback is getting better,” Johnson said. “Yeah, there's some of those that you look at, and he says, man, I’ve got to hit that. And then there's other ones that they're going to be challenging throws that he makes, and it's like, holy cow. We're going to get there. I'm not worried about that aspect of it. It's just a matter of time.”
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Johnson and Williams are likely not where they want to be when it comes to completion percentage, but the first year in this offense was never going to become a finished product. That will take years of reps in this offense to achieve.