Three quarterbacks in NFL history have thrown at least 50 career touchdown passes against 15 or fewer career interceptions. Two of them, Patrick Mahomes and Lamar Jackson, have combined for four MVP awards. The third is Caleb Williams, who spent his rookie season getting labeled a turnover machine who couldn’t protect the football. That label was wrong the moment it started circulating, and this week’s box score makes it official: the interception column was never his problem.
Chicago’s Quietest Big Performance
Williams returned Sunday from the hamstring strain that kept him out three games, and the Chicago Bears needed every bit of him. He completed his first 12 attempts, the longest streak to open a game in his career, and finished 30-for-36 for 305 yards and a touchdown as Chicago beat the Atlanta Falcons 31-23 to improve to 4-2. Chicago led 31-7 in the fourth quarter before Michael Penix Jr. found Kyle Pitts for two touchdowns and added two two-point conversions to make the final score respectable. The Bears held on anyway.
The touchdown itself was his 50th as a pro: a 14-yard throw to Colston Loveland on the opening drive, ten plays and 67 yards with zero incompletions. It’s the type of drive that barely gets mentioned on a Sunday night recap. It’s also the drive that triggered the stat everyone’s been passing around since.
How Many Touchdowns and Interceptions Does Caleb Williams Have?
Caleb Williams has thrown 50 career touchdown passes against 14 career interceptions. That ratio makes him the third quarterback in NFL history, behind only Patrick Mahomes and Lamar Jackson, to reach 50-plus career touchdown passes while throwing 15 or fewer career interceptions.
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It’s a career number, stitched together across three uneven seasons, which is exactly what makes it strange that so much of the public conversation about his rookie year treated turnovers as his defining flaw. The flaw was real. It just wasn’t this one.
The Rookie Year Everyone Remembers Wrong
Go back to 2024 and almost nothing people remember about it holds up against the interception total specifically. Williams threw six picks on 562 attempts that year, a rate low enough that he set an NFL rookie record with 353 consecutive passes without an interception. One interception for roughly every 94 throws is a number a ten-year veteran would frame. A 22-year-old running three different offensive coordinators’ systems in a single season produced it instead.
None of that shows up in the 46.5 QBR he posted that season, which ranked 28th among qualifying passers, because QBR grades what actually went sideways: pressure, not picks. Williams was sacked 68 times, the most in the league and tied for the third-most in any season since the NFL began tracking sacks in 1963, and he was responsible for eight of the Bears’ 15 total fumbles. Two head coaches and three offensive coordinators rotated through that building, and Shane Waldron got fired in November. Troy Aikman said on the broadcast he worried a rookie absorbing that many hits, looking that beaten down, would lose his confidence for good.
He didn’t lose it. Part of why the confidence story stuck is that the sack total and the interception total got filed under the same mental folder, “turnover-prone rookie,” when they measure almost nothing in common. A quarterback can get hit 68 times and still read coverage well enough to avoid giving the ball away; those are different muscles, and Williams kept using the one that mattered while the other one got hammered weekly. The offense climbed from last in the league in total yardage in 2024 to sixth in 2025, Williams set the Bears’ single-season passing record with 3,942 yards, and he finished 12th in the NFL in Passing EPA. Ben Johnson took over as head coach in 2026 with one stated target: push a 58.1% completion rate toward 70%. He said in August that Williams’s accuracy was trending upward.
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What the Number Actually Measures
Sacks and fumbles are team problems wearing a quarterback’s name. An offensive line gets beaten, a protection call gets missed, a running back loses a ball in a pile, and all of it lands in a quarterback’s game log without being a quarterback’s decision. Interceptions are different. They’re closer to pure, isolated judgment: reading a coverage shell, knowing when a window has closed, choosing to throw a ball away instead of forcing it into traffic. That decision-making layer is the one that tends to separate quarterbacks who get paid twice from quarterbacks who don’t, and it’s the layer the Bears’ rookie-year chaos never actually touched.
Mahomes and Jackson are the other two names on this list, and both are two-time MVPs whose ball security under pressure gets treated as the standard for the position. That’s not a guarantee Williams gets there. It is evidence that the specific skill this club measures, not getting picked off, was already present underneath a rookie season that looked, from the outside, like a disaster.
Being this rare matters more than the headline number suggests. The league throws the ball more than it ever has, so touchdown counts eventually arrive for any quarterback who stays healthy and keeps a starting job for a few years. Avoiding interceptions is the harder half of the equation, because it has to hold up through coordinator changes, a rebuilt offensive line, and whatever scheme a new coaching staff decides to install. Williams has now cleared that bar across three different coaching regimes in three seasons, which says more about his decision-making than any one game ever could.
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Chicago’s offense still has real work ahead of it — a 70% completion target doesn’t close itself, and the Bears just watched a 24-point lead shrink to single digits in the fourth quarter alone. But the part of the equation that was supposed to be broken never was, and a quarterback who spent a season getting criticized for turnovers he mostly didn’t throw now has three seasons of box scores saying so. Check the rest of our NFL coverage for more on where Chicago goes from here.
