Tua Tagovailoa had his worst game of the 2022 season in Week 13. His Miami Dolphins not only lost, but lost to a San Francisco 49ers team led by 2022 262nd overall draft pick Brock Purdy.
This dented Tagovailoa’s MVP odds, but it wasn’t enough to dislodge him from the top spot in the advanced stats quarterback rankings. He may not claim that crown much longer — Patrick Mahomes, the odds-on favorite to win the league’s highest individual award, is hot on his heels despite a Week 13 loss of his own.
Those two are followed by Jalen Hurts and Geno Smith. As we all expected back in August.
Yep, this year’s crop of top quarterbacks has been the backdrop to impressive leaps forward from questionable passers and terrible slides from established veterans. Hurts and Smith are light years ahead of guys like Matthew Stafford, Aaron Rodgers and (big exhale) Russell Wilson this fall. Just how far ahead? Fortunately, we’ve got a formula for that.
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 seven weeks. 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 33 quarterbacks (minimum 192 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 and some strange outliers, 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.
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