Damage done to Caleb Williams and whether Bears coaches can fix it

When last season ended, former Bears interim coach Thomas Brown was asked how Caleb Williams handled the rough ride that was the 2024 Bears season.

The concern, of course, is the Bears have broken the quarterback who is the future of the franchise. Or, perhaps they damaged him a bit by ensuring he's going to have three head coaches, three different play callers and four different offensive coordinators in his first two seasons.

"I mean change can be great," Brown said. "Change is also uncomfortable—but being uncomfortable is the only way you grow. So I would say he’s handled it well for the most part.

"I think we all have to adapt and adjust to circumstances."

Change will have to be great for Williams because the coaching wasn't great last year.

It's easy to wonder what kind of impact the change in coaching staff in Year 2 and the move to a different offense will have on Williams.

Then again, the damage would have been much greater had he been asked to endure a second season of 2024 madness. It's difficult to imagine any quarterback could benefit from turmoil like the Bears QB battled but things like it happen all of the time in the NFL.

In fact, in today's NFL it happens more often then it did just seven years ago.

A look at QB turmoil

After the 2018 season, CBS Sports' Chris Trapasso did a study looking at the topic of quarterbacks who must deal with change of coordinators and/or staffs in Year 2.

It was a very relevant study for Chicago because Mitchell Trubisky had just gone through it.

Trapasso's study looked at a decade worth of QB picks and found those in Year 2 who have a change in coaching tend to have a worse completion percentage, make bigger jumps in touchdown percentage, smaller decreases in interception percentage and have bigger jumps in both yards per attempt and passer rating in their second years than QBs who operated in the same system with the same coach in Years 1 and 2.

Trapasso had to set standards to do the study because a quarterback who has only 30 pass attempts as a rookie isn't much use for this, so he looked only at QBs who had at least 200 attempts their first year and at least 100 their second year. So, the study included 30 QBs, and he found in a decade 12 had to deal with changes and 18 did not.

Quarterbacks who had change increased their completion percentage by 1.38%, their touchdown percentage by 1.62%, dropped their interception percentage by 0.56%, had a 0.73% increase in yards per attempt and a 12.1-point improvement in their passer rating.

The 12 quarterbacks for 10 years who had to deal with change in Year 2 were Blake Bortles, Marcus Mariota, Trubisky, Jared Goff, Andrew Luck, Mike Glennon, Sam Bradford, Brandon Weeden, Blaine Gabbert, Nick Foles, Colt McCoy and Derek Carr. There were 18 QBs at the same time who didn't have to deal with change but met the qualifying standards.

Applied to Caleb Williams

As they say, that was then and this is now. So I applied the parameters of his study to all quarterbacks drafted within the time since 2008-2017 drafts.

It's more relevant since QBs from 16 drafts ago faced a much different NFL in terms of teams' patience with passers and also patience with coaches. This much is obvious from the number of passers involved who met parameters of the study.

What was found was QBs who go through coaching change in their second year over the last six drafts have a 1.4% completion percentage improvement, boosted their TD percentage by 0.65%, had an increase of 0.17% in interception percentage, increased their yards per attempt by 0.29 and had passer ratings averaging 5.3 points higher. It was very similar to the previous 10 years except in a few minor ways.

So if Williams just hits the average for second-year QBs who face change, his numbers based on QBs from the last six years will look like this:

63.9% completions, 4.25% touchdown percentage, 1.27% interception percentage, 6.57 yards per attempt and a passer rating of 93.1.

It's apparent Williams is going to need to outperform the averages to meet expectations. This is the pressure failure in Year 1 can bring to bear against passers.

A 63.9% completion percentage isn't great but they could live with it if his touchdown and interception rates are what the averages say they should be in Year 2 with a new coaching staff.

Big improvement needed

The real problem is yards per pass attempt. Williams is going to need to be much better than the average increase. The average increase would put him at 6.59 yards per attempt because he was at 6.3. Those are all abysmal numbers. The NFL average for starters last year was just over 7.0.

Williams needs to be better than a 93.1 passer rating in Year 2, as well. Trubisky was at 95.4 in Year 2 despite his change in staff, or because of it.

Williams already had a better passer rating in Year 1 (87.8) that was better than Justin Fields had in Year 2 (85.2), but Fields had a 12-point jump from Year 1 to Year 2. If Williams can duplicate that jump or just get close, the Bears would be in extremely good shape.

The different NFL

The most interesting part of this study is the total number of QBs.

For a 10-year period, Trapasso's study had 12 quarterbacks who had to deal with offensive system change in Year 2 and 18 who did not.

However, in the subsequent six seasons, there have been 16 quarterbacks who have had to deal with system change in Year 2 and only five who met the parameters and didn't deal with change.

This says teams are being much less patient with coaching and changing coordinators and/or head coaches and they're being much less patient with quarterbacks.

The quarterbacks aren't getting in enough throws in Year 2 or sometimes in Year 1 to qualify for a study like this. The 16 QBs in six years is a much higher rate than the 12 for the previous 10 years, so obviously more quarterbacks are facing coaching change every year.

The study found the effect on quarterbacks to be as impactful or less impactful for the same statistical areas in the last six years with the exception of interception percentage. Quarterbacks had a very slight increase in interception percentage the last six year as opposed to a drop in the percentage from 2008-2017.

The bottom line is Williams must be better than the average quarterback who changes systems in Year 2 if he's going to meet expectations. In some cases, he must be much better.

And Ben Johnson and staff are going to need to do a much better job with him than the average coaching staff that picks up a second-year passer, particularly where it come to Williams improving his yards per pass attempt, his completion percentage and his passer rating.

Then again, the point of changing the staffs was to improve how they handle players because the guys at Halas Hall sure weren't getting it done last season.

QBs facing Year 2 coaching change 2018-23

(200 pass attempts as rookie, at last 100 in Year 2)

Baker Mayfield, Sam Darnold, Josh Rosen, Daniel Jones, Dwayne Haskins, Gardner Minshew, Tua Tagovailoa, Justin Herbert, Trevor Lawrence, Justin Fields, Mac Jones, Davis Mills, Kenny Pickett, Bryce Young, Will Levis, Aidan O'Connell