Josh Allen, as we all expected, is the most valuable quarterback in the NFL through five games. Geno Smith, as only the most demented — or brilliant? — football minds saw coming, is right on his heels.
Smith’s age-32 breakthrough continued last week in a 268-yard, three touchdown performance on only 25 pass attempts against the New Orleans Saints. This wasn’t a function of quick dump-offs and big runs after the catch — though Jimmy Garoppolo has parlayed that into a top 10 ranking (!). Smith threw four passes at least 25 yards downfield. All four were caught and three were touchdowns.
That keeps him on the upper tier for another week, even if his place at the top has been justifiably usurped by Allen and Patrick Mahomes. How’d everyone else shake out? Let’s turn to advanced stats to figure out who brings the most value behind center.
We know the data is limited — but it does give us a pretty good idea of who has risen to the occasion this fall. Let’s see which quarterbacks are great and who truly stinks through four games in the 2022 NFL season. These numbers are from the NFL’s Next Gen Stats model but compiled by the extremely useful RBSDM.com, run by The Athletic’s Ben Baldwin and Sebastian Carl.
Using expected points added (EPA, the value a quarterback adds on any given play compared to the average NFL result) along with completion percentage over expected (CPOE, the percent of his passes that are caught that aren’t expected to be in typical NFL situations) gives us a scatter plot of 32 quarterbacks (minimum 80 plays) that looks like this:
The size of each dot represents the amount of plays they’ve been a part of. A place in the top right means you’re above average in both EPA and CPOE. A place in the bottom left suggests things have gone horribly wrong (i.e. Baker Mayfield).
There are a lot of players taking up the creamy middle ground, making it tough to separate this year’s average quarterbacks into tiers. Here’s my crack at it, but full details follow in the text below.
