What the expected-points record, the coverage data and the market say he is worth at 81.3 overall.
Caleb Williams scored 357.4 fantasy points in 2025. The volume he earned was worth 375.7. That gap of 18.3 points is the single most important thing to understand before drafting him at 81.3 overall.
He finished 18.81 points per game on 658 pass attempts — a 25.7% jump on his 2024 rate with CHI. Every part of that is real and none of it is in dispute.
What is worth separating is how much of it he earned. Expected points strip out the finishing and ask a narrower question: given the throws he made, where they went and how far downfield they traveled, what was that usage worth? For 2025 the answer was 375.7 points — 19.8 per game. He scored 18.3 FEWER than that, a 4.9% shortfall.
The expected line underneath the season was 4,646 passing yards and 31.2 passing touchdowns, plus 393 rushing yards and 4.3 rushing touchdowns — and he came in under it.
Against the expected line, he finished 4,560 passing yards, 31 passing touchdowns, 443 rushing yards, 3 rushing touchdowns, 22 receiving yards — against 4,646, 31.2, 393, 4.3, 0 expected.
41% of the entire shortfall came from rushing touchdowns. He hit 70% of his expected rushing touchdowns, against 98% of his expected passing yards and 99% of his expected passing touchdowns and 113% of his expected rushing yards and 2200% of his expected receiving yards.
That matters because touchdowns are the least repeatable part of a scoring line. Volume and yards reflect a role; touchdowns reflect a role plus a quarterback putting the ball where it can be caught in a nine-yard window. A player who holds his catches and yards while losing five touchdowns has not lost his job — he has lost the coin flips.
3 of his 17 games produced 25 or more points: Week 3 against DAL (29.12), Week 9 against CIN (38.7), Week 10 against NYG (25.1). Strip them and the remaining 14 games average 16.1.
Spike weeks win fantasy games and a player who produces them is more valuable than one who never does — he is a ceiling play with real weeks off. 2 games came in under 10 points, including Week 7 against NO (4.68) and Week 13 against PHI (9.46).
The three largest overshoots — Week 9 (+18.9), Week 3 (+12.1), Week 6 (+3.7) — are the same games. The spikes were not extra volume. They were finishing.
Not one of his 2 seasons is flagged as running hot. 1 came in below what the usage justified: 2024 (-19%). Across both seasons he has scored 78.2 points fewer than his usage was worth.
The reflexive read is regression. Finishing above expectation is unstable, and a player who does it repeatedly is usually one whose luck has not run out yet.
But an expected-points model has a specific blind spot, and it is worth naming: it converts usage at league-average rates. A target twenty yards downfield is worth what the average receiver does with a target twenty yards downfield. If a player is reliably better than average at winning a particular kind of target, he will beat the model every single year, and calling that luck is just mislabelling a skill.
So the question is not whether he beat the number. It is whether there is a mechanism.
Across 96 graded prop lines, he has gone over 45.8% of the time. On passing yards specifically the number is 43.8% across 32 lines, missing the posted number by an average of 0.3%.
That is close enough to a coin flip that the market has him fairly priced on his primary market. There is no edge to claim in either direction.
Touchdowns are the control. His anytime-TD market implied a 21.6% rate and he converted at 12.5% — a gap of -9.1 points, which is worth noting.
Across 1,151 player-seasons we swept every stat for whether it predicts NEXT year's points, and kept only the ones that replicated in all five. team implied total (r 0.146) carry.
So the figures worth weighing for him: 658 pass attempts, 55.97 passing EPA, 8.5 air yards per attempt. He was pressured on 25.1% of dropbacks, and put 69.8% of throws on target. He carried it 86 times, taking 6.8% of his team’s goal-line carries — the only replicated floor factor at the position.
Vegas sets an implied total for every team every week, and some offenses beat theirs systematically. Over 104 games, CHI has come in +0.48 points against its own implied total, clearing it in 52% of weeks.
That is close to neutral — the offense performs about where the market expects, so there is no environment bonus or penalty to apply to him either way.
One related finding worth carrying: across 1,280 cases we measured what happens after a team's implied total slides, and the correlation is -0.37 — negative, meaning the market over-corrects. A falling team total is more often a buying window than a warning.
Our board has him at 346.4 points, 20.6 per game across 16.8 expected games — 4,366 passing yards, 30.9 passing touchdowns, 384 rushing yards, 2.8 rushing touchdowns. That is QB2, 68 overall, and 25 points of value over a replacement starter.
It is a step down from 2025, and the reason is volume rather than efficiency. The projection assumes he keeps doing what he does on slightly fewer looks.
real, acknowledged accuracy concerns that may be a genuine limitation rather than a rookie hiccup — multiple sub-replacement-level floor games last season the other names in this tier didn't have. Counterweight: his top two weapons both enter year two of a complex scheme under a coach who personally drafted them and has shown he unlocks rookies specifically in year two, plus a historically easy schedule against defenses not strong enough to keep opponents out of shootouts.
That is the current read. It has held since 2026-06-05.
It rests on these draft principles:
The books do not agree on him. Caleb Williams is a board split: Yahoo takes him ~70, ESPN lets him slide to ~93 (22.6-pick gap). That 22.6-pick gap between Yahoo and ESPN is the practical thing to act on: in a ESPN-priced room he is available later than his consensus number suggests.
He goes at 81.3 overall on consensus, and the books are far apart — 22.6 picks between cheapest and priciest, which is a real value window. He is latest on espn and earliest on yahoo: sleeper 75.7, espn 92.5, yahoo 69.9, underdog 73.1, cbs 87.1.
He goes at 81.3 and our board has him 68. That is 13.3 picks of discount on a QB2 projection — you are getting the QB2 outcome at a price the room has set below it.
The case for: a 34% boom rate; 86 carries of his own, and rushing is the only quarterback signal that survived testing.
The case against: a floor of 16.5 points per game, which is the outcome you are underwriting if the role moves.
The call: take him at his ADP and do not talk yourself out of it.
Ask the Coach about Caleb Williams Every number in this piece, plus your league's roster and scoring, in one answer.Expected points are computed from realized usage — targets, air yards and field position — against league-average conversion, not from projections. Prop records cover 96 graded lines. Projections are anchored to consensus with our engine applied as a capped tilt; the raw engine figure is stated where it differs. Nothing here is betting advice.