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Caleb Williams rises to the challenge, more Week 12 thoughts: Quick Outs

27 November 2024Last Update :
Caleb Williams rises to the challenge, more Week 12 thoughts: Quick Outs

There was no shortage of chaos or juicy storylines from Week 12’s slate of games. Almost every matchup (sorry Buccaneers-Giants) gave us either a wire-to-wire heart-pounder or a new lens through which to appreciate at least one of the teams involved. It was a good jolt in the arm before the holiday football stretch.

Not everything can get the Quick Outs treatment, though, so we’ve narrowed it down to a few key performances.

First-overall pick Caleb Williams finally earned the quarterbacking charting spotlight after what he did to the Minnesota Vikings’ defense. Saquon Barkley found yet another way to bolster his offensive player of the year campaign. And both the Miami Dolphins offense and Seattle Seahawks defense showed signs that they can be different, stronger units than they were a month ago — just in time for the playoff push.

Let’s dive in.

QB charting: Caleb Williams

I’ll be honest: The bar I set for Williams in his first game against Vikings DC Brian Flores was not very high. Anything other than a complete meltdown in the face of Flores’ explosive pass-rush packages would have been a win, especially given Williams looked like a broken player just a few weeks ago before the Bears fired Shane Waldron. Getting through Sunday’s game with just a couple cuts and bruises was the goal.

Williams instead played like the guy billed as the surefire No. 1 pick a full year before he entered the NFL Draft.

He was accurate on 82.6 percent of his passes against the Vikings — absolutely stellar.

Some portion of that can be attributed to the Bears’ screen game. Facing a matchup in which Chicago’s rushing attack was outmatched, the Bears had to turn to screens to replace that run game a little bit. DJ Moore, in particular, has finally been unlocked through that aspect of the offense. Williams got a few freebies that way.

Williams was dealing everywhere else, though. The Vikings had no way to stop Williams underneath, for one. By my count, Williams was inaccurate on just two of 22 attempts in the 1- to 10-yard range. The first was batted at the line of scrimmage on the opening drive; the other was a speed out miss to Keenan Allen on fourth down in the third quarter. The latter was a tough one to miss, but it hurt a bit less considering all the other throws he made.

Caleb Williams’ Week 12 numbers
Comp Att TDs WR Adj. Pass def.
Total
38 (5 drops)
46
2
1
4
Under pressure
7 (2 drops)
7
1
0
0
Out of pocket
2
3
1
0
1
5-plus pass rushers
12 (1 drop)
13
2
1
1
Man coverage
7 (2 drops)
9
1
0
1
Zone coverage
21 (3 drops)
27
0
1
2
Tight window
7 (1 drop)
13
0
0
4
Open window
21 (4 drops)
23
1
1
0

The intermediate area is where Williams flashed his superstar talent. Everyone is going to remember the deep dig route to Moore to get the team into field goal range to send it to overtime, but there was so much more.

Williams fit a corner route into a keyhole to Allen on the right side, as well as a seam ball away from a poaching safety early in the second quarter. He found tight end Cole Kmet down the seam a number of times. On the Bears’ second-to-last drive, Williams fired a fourth-and-3 dig route on the top shelf to Rome Odunze, so as to not run him into the safety screaming downhill.

Besides the throws themselves, Williams was accurate on all seven pressured dropbacks (by my charting), despite two drops that hurt the box score. When Flores sent extra bodies, as he loves to do, Williams was accurate on all but one of those throws. None of those plays even include the efforts Williams made as a scrambler to convert a couple third downs.

Williams still had his rookie moments Sunday, no doubt about it. He could have thrown at least two picks on aggressive downfield attempts, and he took an excruciatingly bad sack in overtime after holding the ball for an eternity.

Williams was barely even trying to make those plays during the downturn of the Waldron tenure, though. Those kinds of confident mistakes, rather than the uncertain and panicky ones he was making before, are easier to handle. They’re the plays the Bears bargained for in the first place by drafting a quarterback with Superman syndrome.

The Bears did not win the game, but they got what they wanted out of it — their high-flying superstar quarterback finally looked like the guy he was billed to be.

Stat check: Saquon Barkley’s success rate

Barkley adds another mark to his Offensive Player of the Year case every week.

For the first month and a half of the season, Barkley was the only thing that could get the Eagles’ offense going. More recently, the offense as a whole has stepped up around Barkley, only making his explosive-play ability that much more accessible and devastating.

Sunday night’s performance against the Los Angeles Rams, however, was a showcase of brutal efficiency. Sure, Barkley popped a couple huge runs, but it was his endless down-to-down efficiency that made it a special outing.

Barkley carried the ball 26 times while maintaining a 57.1 percent rushing success rate, according to TruMedia. It’s the only time this season any runner with least 25 carries has topped a 55 percent rate. (The average rushing success rate this season for a game with 25-plus carries this season is 40.1 percent.)

And in case you’re wondering, there isn’t a whole lot of precedent for a game like this in recent seasons, either — there have been just 12 such games by a running back since 2020, including Barkley’s on Sunday night. This season, only Joe Mixon (Week 1), Tank Bigsby (Week 7) and Alvin Kamara (Week 9) have hit those marks.

Efficiency is not supposed to hold with that many touches. The more you do one thing, the more likely it is that its efficiency creeps closer to the mean — that’s just the relationship between volume and efficiency, and it’s why balance on offense is important.

But Barkley and this Eagles offensive line are not bound to the same rules as everyone else. They’ve made that clear all season long, and Sunday night’s beatdown of the Rams gave us a new way to experience their dominance.

Needle-mover: Miami Dolphins TE Jonnu Smith

There’s no quibbling about the most important players on Miami’s offense —  Tyreek Hill, Jaylen Waddle and De’Von Achane are the turbocharged weapons that allow Mike McDaniel to scheme up a million different ways to stretch defenses vertically and horizontally. The abundance of speed is unlike anything else in the league.

The Dolphins have long needed someone to take advantage of the space all that speed creates, though. They don’t really use their running backs as checkdown options over the middle, and there hasn’t been a tight end or third wide receiver to really feast over the short middle of the field in the past two seasons.

It didn’t seem like the Dolphins had that guy for the first most of this season, either, but Smith’s emergence has finally filled that void. After seeing just 13 combined targets over Miami’s first four games, Smith has been targeted at least six times in six of the past seven games and has 50 targets in all during that span.

The volume of targets isn’t what really matters with Smith — it’s the location. Smith’s average depth of target in Tua Tagovailoa’s starts this season is 4.84 yards. Running backs aside, that’s by far the lowest mark on the team right now.

It’s also the lowest mark, by almost two full yards, of any tight end with Tagovailoa as his QB since Mike McDaniel took over in 2022. Durham Smythe finished with an average depth of target of 6.60 yards in 2023; Mike Gesicki was at 8.79 in 2022. Neither of those guys saw nearly as many targets as Smith has this year. The Dolphins are clearly deploying Smith as an underneath threat in a way they never have before with their tight ends (or other wide receivers).

That underneath presence has been especially needed since fullback Alec Ingold went out of the lineup with an injury late in October, because the Dolphins have not been able to get into their 21 personnel packages and threaten the run the way they had been trying to. Since Ingold’s injury, they’ve shifted more to 12 personnel packages, with Smith and another tight end on the field — and Smith’s usage has shot up as a result.

Smith’s work underneath gives the passing offense a degree of stability it didn’t always have. Chunk plays to Hill, Waddle and Achane will always be what really moves this offense, but now there’s someone underneath doing the dirty work to give the superstars those chances more often. That can go a long way for a Dolphins team trying to make an implausible playoff push.

Scramble drill: I think the Seattle Seahawks’ defensive revival is real

Giving Mike MacDonald the linebacker of his choosing at the trade deadline seems to be the easiest pathway to a good defense.

Two years ago, MacDonald was defensive coordinator for a decent but inconsistent Baltimore Ravens unit that ascended to the top of the league the moment that defense acquired Roquan Smith from the Chicago Bears. The Seahawks copy-and-pasted that formula with McDonald this season, acquiring Ernest Jones from the Tennessee Titans midseason.

Jones is not peak Roquan Smith, and the Seahawks aren’t as suffocating as that Ravens team was for a season and a half — but they’re closer than anyone could’ve hoped.

Think back to where the Seahawks were a month ago. They had just dropped an embarrassing game to the Buffalo Bills to fall to 4-4, in large part because their defense could not stop anybody. A number of injuries along the defensive line factored into that, but the linebacker corps never looked settled and the secondary was struggling to find its footing.

Now, consider the past three weeks with a healthier defensive line, Jones commanding the middle of the defense, and Josh Jobe taking over the outside cornerback spot opposite Riq Woolen.

Since Week 10, the Seahawks’ defense ranks sixth in EPA per play (0.14). That’s a small sample, but Seattle has played the Los Angeles Rams, San Francisco 49ers, and Arizona Cardinals over that span — all of those offenses are average at worst, and the Cardinals were arguably a top-five unit heading into their Week 12 meeting.

By that measurement, the other teams around the Seahawks have defenses we know to be good, too — the Vikings are right behind them in seventh place; the Denver Broncos and Dolphins are a hair ahead of them (while technically tied at 0.14 EPA per play). Rounding out the top three are the Eagles, Houston Texans and Detroit Lions. At least over the past three weeks, the Seahawks feel every bit as “real” as those defenses.

So much of this turnaround is rooted in the trade for Jones. What he brings in run defense — both as someone Seattle can send on designed run blitzes to crush a guard or ask to just play smart, tough football behind his defensive tackles — has had a cascade effect. The defense now can more reliably get into clear passing situations, which is where MacDonald gets to really throw his fastball with simulated pressures and tricky zone-coverage rotations.

October’s version of the Seahawks just could not get there as frequently, and the entire unit suffered for it.

Jones has been a real difference-maker, and the big men in front of him have all stepped up now that they are healthy. Plus, nickel cornerback Devon Witherspoon is starting to play like an All-Pro-caliber player again. It’s all coalescing for this Seahawks’ defense in a way that’s hard to ignore.

(Top photo of Caleb Williams: Luke Hales / Getty Images)

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