The 2023 NFL season kicked off its first Sunday not with a bang, but with a lot of short, incomplete passes.
Week 1’s matchups were frustrating one way or another almost across the board. A league where success is defined by the passing game saw a sudden power outage behind center. What began with a helpless Patrick Mahomes on Thursday night continued as veterans and young quarterbacks alike, well, stunk.
Kenny Pickett led the Pittsburgh Steelers to one yard of total offense in his first 28 minutes of the season. Kirk Cousins, in true Kirk Cousins fashion, buttressed tidy stats with red zone turnovers and lost to a Tampa Bay Buccaneers team that appeared to be purposefully tanking the 2023 season. Deshaun Watson only looked good in comparison to the Joe Burrow mannequin the Cincinnati Bengals Weekend at Bernie’s through a 24-3 loss in Cleveland for 3.5 quarters Sunday afternoon.
This was merely a sample of the power outage that struck the NFL’s opening weekend. But which quarterbacks were the most disappointing?
Fortunately, we’ve got tools to better understand just how damaging these underwhelming performances were. Using the advanced stat expected points added (EPA) can gauge how much a quarterback brings to the table compared to a typical player. By comparing each passer’s Week 1 EPA against their 2022 average we get a better picture of just how frustrating their debuts were. And we can find both of those thanks to The Athletic’s Ben Baldwin and his incredibly useful stats sites RBSDM.com and HabitatRing.com.
Who was the worst? Well, there were several candidates but only one man can truly call himself the grossest quarterback of Week 1.
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