Caleb Williams Makes Me Feel Like I'm Taking Crazy Pills

I was about 30 years late to the party on Twin Peaks.

For the first time in my life, I watched it last year. The first season and a half were genuinely dazzling, basically right up until Leland is revealed as Bob and is then killed.

That sentence made me remember the sequence in a way that gave me goosebumps again.

The guy that plays Bob is in hall of fame of people with scary faces. It’s him and Peter Pettigrew.

At the centre of it, you could feel a level of genius with David Lynch.

Having said all of that, and while the truthers may not like it, the second part of season 2 is terrible.

How many episodes do we need with Leo obviously coming back to life? Why is this MILF trying to date that weirdo James? How long do we need to spend with these people?

This show is on every single best TV show of all-time list and a quarter of it is just not good, even though there was obvious genius there.

It made me feel like I was taking crazy pills.

That’s a very dated way to tell you that I feel like I’m taking crazy pills with Caleb Williams.

You can’t dispute that he has the Bears at 8-3, nor can you dispute that he’s very talented.

Beyond that, the nerds are telling me how good it is and how well it’s working with Ben Johnson.

But I can’t help but ask the Moneyball question: if he’s a good player why doesn’t’ he play good? Or more to it, why doesn’t he play good more often?

The answer is relatively straightforward. Caleb makes that hard stuff easy and the easy stuff hard.

Williams has proven himself to be virtually impossible to sack, especially compared to how he was last year. Williams has absorbed 91 pressures, top-5 in the league, but has been sacked just 17 times largely because of he’s a Nick Mullen level improviser.

It’s not just with his legs, either. Caleb has an elastic and freaky arm that can pin the ball on receivers at a rate of knots, almost irrespective of what his feet are doing.

The problem is that this trait is neither feature, nor bug. It’s the entire car. He lives in creation mode.

That’s in diametric opposition to the idea of Ben Johnson as offensive playcaller.

By bringing in Johnson, the Bears hoped that he could hone Caleb’s flair for the dramatic and pair it highly regimented and schemed up world that Ben Johnson created for Jared Goff to make life easy on his quarterback.

With a diverse run game and a passing game built off that, the Lions were a consistent and explosive offence helmed by a quarterback who got to the top of his drop and let it rip, secure in the knowledge that his coach had schemed guys open.

Over Johnson’s three years calling plays with the Lions they had a 47% success rate, fifth in the NFL over that span. They were essentially always on track.

In his Johnson’s final year with the Lions, Goff had a 55% success rate with about 9 adjusted yards per attempt and copping about 2 hurries per game.

Williams this year, has a 45% success rate (tied with Justin Fields for 25^th, just behind Geno Smith) for 7.4 adjusted yards per attempt and about 5 hurries a game.

While some elements of the Lions’ passing game have been imported, particularly a strong run game and a heavy focus on under centre play action, the Bears haven’t been anywhere near as broadly effective as the Lions were.

There are a number of factors leading to Williams’ worse numbers, including:

this is Johnson’s first year for the Bears and the Lions were a well-oiled machine when he left,

the Bears have a worse offensive infrastructure than the Lions did, and

the Bears receivers are dropping everything.

But you can’t discount Williams himself. He simply refuses to get the ball out on time and in rhythm. When he does let it rip at the top of his drop, he looks good.

But more often than not, he gets to the top of drop, will have an NFL open receiver but gets into creation mode because he either doesn’t trust what he’s seeing, won’t throw over the middle, or wants something bigger.

He is 62^nd out of 64 quarterbacks in time to throw.

It’s almost more frustrating that he’s so good at creating and therefore keeps doing it, rather than trusting the infrastructure that we know Johnson can build around him.

He clearly trusts himself above all else, but the way he’s living just isn’t repeatable long-term.

Ben Johnson’s way is.

Johnson is a genius at creating easy explosives. He, and everyone else bar Caleb, knows it and it’s hampering their success down to down.

Right now, Caleb is like Don Draper for the first five seasons of Mad Men where his unique genius trumped the fact that he was uniquely impossible to be around.

But sooner rather than later, Caleb is going to have a Hershey’s meeting where it unravels for him if he doesn’t learn to trust the world he’s in.

We know that he can do the easy stuff and do it well. We know that Ben Johnson is uniquely gifted at making the easy stuff also be explosive.

We just need Williams himself to let himself do the easy thing as the first option, and the hard thing as a last resort rather than the other way around.

Once he starts taking the easy, repeatable completions I won’t feel like I’m taking crazy pills anymore.