In the end, 2022’s top quarterback was no surprise. Despite challenges from Tua Tagovailoa, Jalen Hurts and Geno Smith — it was an exciting and slightly weird year! — Patrick Mahomes ultimately stood head and shoulders above the fray.
Mahomes led the Kansas City Chiefs to the AFC’s top seed (albeit controversially thanks to the cancellation of Week 17’s Bills-Bengals tilt), led the NFL in passing yards and touchdowns by a comfortable margin and, unsurprisingly, was the league’s most efficient quarterback in terms of advanced stats.
His adjusted expected points added per play — a measure that compares a player’s impact against what an average player historically has done in the same situation — was a robust 0.306. Essentially, he made the Chiefs a field goal better than expected every 10 dropbacks he took.
This was enough to outpace Tagovailoa, Hurts, Smith, Josh Allen and … fellow top 10 quarterbacks Jimmy Garoppolo and Jared Goff? Huh. Well, like I said, exciting year. Let’s get into it.
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 272 plays, or 16 per game) 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.
