The NFL Top 100 list is a popularity contest voted by the people who actually have to tackle these guys, so when Caleb Williams checks in at No. 51, that’s not media hype — that’s 1,700-some defensive players saying, “Yeah, that one was a problem.”
The Bears quarterback earned the spot after a second season that rewrote the franchise record book and dragged Chicago out of a decade-plus of quarterback purgatory. Williams set a Bears single-season passing record with 3,942 yards and posted a 27-to-7 touchdown-to-interception ratio that ranked fifth across the league. He led the Bears to their first division title since 2018 and their first postseason win since 2010 — a wild-card victory over the Packers in which he threw for 361 yards, the most by any Bears quarterback in a playoff game.
Then there’s the number that should terrify the rest of the NFC: seven. Williams engineered seven comeback wins in games the Bears trailed inside the final two minutes — six in the regular season, one in the playoffs — the most by any NFL team since at least 1970. Two of those came against Green Bay, both erasing double-digit fourth-quarter deficits. The wild-card edition sent the Packers home.
Pro Football Focus graded his overtime touchdown pass to D.J. Moore against the Packers as the single highest-graded pass of the 2025 season — a 57-yard dime that traveled in the air from near his own 45 to Moore in stride at the Green Bay 46. It was the only pass all year to earn a +2.0 PFF grade.
First-year head coach Ben Johnson, who arrived from Detroit and immediately reworked Williams’ footwork last spring, didn’t mince words about the trajectory.
“I’m Caleb Williams’ No. 1 believer,” Johnson said. “I have a lot of faith in him, what he’s capable of doing, and the player that he’s still striving to become.”
General manager Ryan Poles pointed to a trait that doesn’t show up cleanly on a stat sheet: pocket presence. “When you watched his college tape, you knew that some of those wild throws were part of his game,” Poles said. “I would say the one thing that stands out that I was happy to see come back was his pocket presence, his ability to escape. I think that is a rare trait that he has.”
Williams started every game for the second consecutive season, making him the first Bears quarterback to do that in back-to-back years since the NFL expanded to 16 games in 1978. The last two Bears quarterbacks to make every start in two straight seasons were Bob Avellini in 1976-77 and Bill Wade in 1962-63. That gap tells you everything about why No. 51 feels like a floor, not a ceiling.
The NFL Top 100 countdown continues in stages, with two players revealed daily at 9 a.m. and 10 a.m. CT through Aug. 21, followed by the top 10 unveiled one per weekday from Aug. 24 through Sept. 4.
