2024 Draft: Caleb Williams is the Rightful Crown Jewel of the Class

Barring a catastrophe, USC quarterback Caleb Williams is going to be a shot in the arm for whichever franchise is bad enough to draft him.

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Alright, I’ve taken enough of a break from the NFL Draft. It’s time to shift gears and start looking at 2024’s class! I’ll be firing up my 2024 NFL Draft big board here soon, and I can’t think of a better place to start than with a guy who is being considered the crown jewel of the class, Caleb Williams.

Williams is coming off of a prolific 2022 campaign that saw him complete 66.6% of his passes for 4,537 yards and 42 touchdowns (to just five interceptions), with 382 rushing yards and 10 rushing touchdowns to boot. It was good enough to yield the Heisman Trophy. USC entered the Pac-12 Championship game at 11-1. Had they been able to defeat Utah, they likely would’ve made the College Football Playoff and robbed us of that Georgia-Ohio State classic. Nonetheless, his gaudy 2022 started to generate some real NFL-first-overall-pick buzz over the course of the season.

Given how he plays the game, it was only a matter of time before people started drawing parallels between Patrick Mahomes and him. The other day, I saw one of those spammy aggregator accounts tweet that scouts believe he’s a prospect on the same level as Trevor Lawrence and Andrew Luck. At this point, the hype is at a fever pitch. We’re already talking about the 2024 NFL Draft as “the Caleb Williams sweepstakes,” and I’m always going to err on the side of slowing that kind of talk down just a bit. A million things can happen between now and next April. You just never know.

But, there is a sort of hypnotic quality to his game that makes it easy to see why so many draft nuts, writers, and scouts are salivating over him. He’s an electric player that is a ton of fun to watch and if that translates to the next level, he is going to make a fuck ton of money. I stayed up late watching enough Pac-12 After Dark to know that Williams was a human highlight reel last season. So, for me, when I think about building out my 2024 big board, he’s the perfect place to start.

For this film study, I watched his games on the road at Oregon State and Utah, and then a home game with high stakes late in the season against Notre Dame. These are his stat lines from these three games: