Caleb Williams Fantasy and Real-Life Projections for 2025 with Andy Behrens
One of fantasy football's sharpest minds discusses how the Chicago Bears' sophomore signal caller might perform on the field and in your fantasy box score.
SIMILAR TO yours truly, Andy Behrens is a lifelong Chicago sports fan, dating back to the days of Dave Kingman, Walter Payton, and Artis Gilmore. Chances are quite good that when Andy and I were kids, we sat near each other at Wrigley Field.
My pseudo-neighbor has lived in the city for over 30 years, the last 20 of which have been spent writing and analyzing fantasy sports. His work has appeared on ESPN and Yahoo Sports.
And now his thoughts will have appeared in Chicago Sports Stuff, which, frankly, is way cooler than ESPN or Yahoo.
In part one of our three-part chat about what the 2025 Chicago Bears might look like both on the turf and in the box score, Andy broke down why Bears quarterback Caleb Williams simply oozes fantasy and reality potential.
ALAN GOLDSHER: Re: Caleb Williams, if you take his 2024 in a vacuum versus comparing it to Jayden Daniels, he did pretty well for himself. Do you see a step up, or a better version of what he was last year, that being an exciting game manager?
ANDY BEHRENS: Oh, I think he's better than an exciting game manager. And I also think that if you look at Caleb’s 2024 and don't judge it by the standards of him being the number one overall pick—making him a guy that Chicago passed on literally everyone else to get—you’ll have a different take.
If you had evaluated Drake Maye’s season or Bo Nix's season and put them under the same microscope, and gave them the same attention you give the number one overall pick, then we’d talk more about their missed opportunities, their misfires, and their poor decisions. It wasn’t like Nix had a completely clean season, nor did Maye.
Caleb was under a much different microscope, number one because he was the top pick, and number two because he's a Bears quarterback—and there's a built-in narrative around Bears quarterbacks.
My overriding concern with Caleb isn’t the sacks or the pressures—the actual pressures that were attributable to him didn’t look terrible, and [GM Ryan Poles] clearly addressed the offensive line in a meaningful way. That said, I don't know how much better it's going to be [right away] because O-lines take a little while to marinate before the individual part come together into something actually protects a quarterback.
The thing that bothered me about Caleb’s 2024 the most was his aversion to putting the ball at risk. Almost all of his bad misses were him just simply not giving a receiver a chance to make a play.
A.G.: Sometimes when I close my eyes, I have visions of Williams overthrowing Rome Odunze by 20 yards.
A.B.: Yeah, and it was weird with Rome. There’re a handful of quarterback receiver/combos—like Patrick Mahomes and young Mecole Hardman, for instance—that were always on different pages. It seemed like Rome and Caleb were quite often reading from different scripts last year.
A.G.: Is that attributable to the play calling and the offensive line, or do you think there was a disconnect between the two?
A.B.: Remember, they were rookies, so probably 50/50. [Defensive] pressure plays a role in it, too. There's no question that the miserable coaching situation in which Caleb found himself didn’t help—and, to his credit, he knew it was coming. It didn’t seem like he was as prepared as he needed to be each week.
A.G.: How are the team’s changes going to impact his fantasy value? I look at him right now as something along the line of a QB13, so almost exactly middle of the pack, better than, say, a Brock Purdy or Trevor Lawrence.
A.B.: He’s certainly more interesting to me than Brock Purdy, but there's obviously a vast difference when we're comparing fantasy versus reality and quarterback values, because rushing is such a critical component of fantasy value.
In reality, you don't need to be a great rushing quarterback to be a winning quarterback, but in fantasy, there's almost no path to finishing as a top-three or top-five fantasy QB unless you have significant rushing upside, because 5,000-yard, 45-touchdown seasons don’t come around that often.
Caleb has significant rushing upside and it was almost fluky that we didn't see any rushing scores out of him last year—he was a proactive, creative runner.
He's not a guy who's going to do Justin Fields things, but can we get 500 rushing yards four rushing touchdowns out of him? Sure, and thats enough to put him in the top-five conversation.
But with [head coach] Ben Johnson here, Caleb's gonna have to change his game a lot. He's gonna have to do a whole lot that he didn't do last year.
A.G.: Like what?
A.B.: I don't want to fall into the trap of saying that Ben Johnson is going to do with Caleb exactly what he did with Jared Goff, because they're different players. But the Detroit Lions ran so much play action last year, and used tons of motion, and that is not what the Bears did, and that’s not what Caleb did.
A.G.: No. No, it’s not.
A.B.: I think there's going to be a little bit more asked of Williams, pre-snap. There's going to be more on his plate, there’s going to be a tougher coaching environment. He’s certainly capable of processing all that—and I love the new talent around him—but there could be some rough moments.
I hope people are patient because the Bears are in a pretty unforgiving division. They come out of the gates with a couple of tough matchups [the Minnesota Vikings and the Detroit Lions], and they could look really good offensively in the first two weeks, but still be 0-and-2. Hopefully people won’t panic.
A.G.: Since Johnson was hired, Caleb has discussed about how badly he wants to be coached up. Do you see him embracing Ben Johnson’s philosophy and making the sophomore jump or, as you alluded to before, might it be too much for him to process?
A.B.: The Bears’ leaderboard in terms of single season passing is just absolutely embarrassing. In this era, a quarterback can have a 4,000-yard season and it might not be considered a good year—and the Bears haven’t had a single 4,000-yard passer in franchise history. At the minimum, Caleb tops that. I'd be shocked if he didn't make a jump and throw for 4,000-plus-yards.
I think the offense is going to be a lot more creative, but I don't know that we'll get the full Ben Johnson experience this year. When you think of some of the things that were so dazzling about the Lions in recent years, those levels of deception take a while.
I don't think they're going to roll out [the trick plays] in Week One or Week Two. But in the NFL, everything builds on what you've already mastered, so I think by the time we get to [Johnson’s] second season—or maybe even deep into the first season—we're going to see some really fun stuff.
A.G.: Predict Caleb's final grade both as a fantasy option and a reality option.
A.B.: A big piece of it is Caleb being more willing to put the ball at risk and to give his receivers chances to make plays. And if we get that, I think there's a pretty good chance we get a B-plus, or even an A-minus season.
Fantasy-wise. I'll be disappointed if we don’t see an A-minus. I think he's got everything that it takes: He’s tough as nails, he’s really smart, and he can be thrilling. I imagine him as Ben Roethlisberger, if Ben Roethlisberger had more rushing juice.
A.G.: I think of him as Cam Newton with less rushing juice.
A.B.: Yeah. Might be like a teacup version of Cam Newton.
A.G.: Exactly. So is Williams a fantasy league winner? Is he the kind of guy who you're going to draft in the eighth, ninth, or tenth round and gloat after you've won your league’s version of the Lombardi Trophy?
A.B.: It's in his range of outcomes. When Lamar Jackson was a league winner, it was because he was about the tenth quarterback off the board, and Caleb in that range right now.
Visit Andy on Twitter (we’ll never call it X) at https://x.com/andybehrens.