We’ve talked a lot about the very good quarterbacks in these rankings. Today, let’s talk about the bad ones.
Specifically the ones in New York.
Week 14 was an opportunity to throw away past results and future expectations and just enjoy the ride. Zach Wilson played the best game of his career and the Jets dusted the Houston Texans. Tommy DeVito took another step toward become a bonafide sensation in the Giants’ comeback win over the Green Bay Packers. Each were top five quarterbacks for one week despite being left for dead earlier in the season.
Alas, we know it won’t last. Wilson is Wilson, the quarterback with exceptional traits but a glaring inability to put them all together. He’s the same guy Jets players were publicly clamoring to replace with a 40-year-old.
And if you’d like to anoint DeVito, that’s fine.There’s no denying he’s outplayed whatever meager expectations he’d earned as an undrafted free agent this year. He’s a fun player with a gloriously New Jersey upbringing who addresses football with a “play hard, die pretty” ethos on the field.
But don’t get too invested. We’ve seen this before. It rarely ends well.
DeVito is the latest overlooked quarterback to excel thanks, in part, to the overarching lack of game tape for opposing coordinators to parse.
Nick Mullens did it six years ago with the San Francisco 49ers. On Sunday he came off the bench to relieve Joshua Dobbs, who took advantage with opponents’ lack of familiarity for two different teams in 2023. Dobbs outplayed expectations, soared to great heights then came crashing back to about where we expected for both the Arizona Cardinals and Minnesota Vikings this fall.
Odds are, DeVito’s going to start regressing. Same with Wilson. But they crushed it in Week 14 and stated their respective cases as “NOT THE WORST STARTING QUARTERBACK IN THE NFL,” which is nice. Now let’s see who is, per advanced stats.
Expected points added (EPA) is a concept that’s been around since 1970. It’s effectively a comparison between what an average quarterback could be expected to do on a certain down and what he actually did — and how it increased his team’s chances of scoring. The model we use comes from The Athletic’s Ben Baldwin and his RBSDM.com website, which is both wildly useful AND includes adjusted EPA, which accounts for defensive strength. It considers the impact of penalties and does not negatively impact passers for fumbles after a completion.
The other piece of the puzzle is completion percentage over expected (CPOE), which is pretty much what it sounds like. It’s a comparison of all the completions a quarterback would be expected to make versus the ones he actually did. Like EPA, it can veer into the negatives and higher is better. So if you chart all 31 primary quarterbacks — the ones who played at least 224 snaps in 14 weeks — you get a chart that looks like this:
Top right hand corner is good. Bottom left corner is bad. Try splitting those passers visually into tiers and you get an imperfect eight-layer system that looks like this:
These rankings are sorted by a composite of adjusted EPA and CPOE to better understand who has brought the most — and the least — value to their teams across the small sample size. It’s not a full exploration of a player’s value, but it’s a viable starting point. Let’s take a closer look.