Jordan Love has the Green Bay Packers exactly where Aaron Rodgers left them: in need of a Week 18 win, at home against a surging divisional rival, to make the playoffs.
In 2023, that manifested in a 16-20 loss to the Detroit Lions in which Rodgers threw for only 205 yards with as many touchdowns (one) as interceptions. That’s the standard Love has to beat against a similarly ascendant team that had previously been the division’s doormat. The Chicago Bears enter the final week of the regular season with a 5-2 record in their last seven games. In that stretch, they’ve fielded the league’s toughest defense.
That’s going to make this January matchup much different than the last time these squads faced each other in September. It’s going to put an inconsistent, high-ceiling young quarterback to the test.
Love has been occasionally great and briefly awful in his first season as a full-time starter, sometimes within the same half of football. As 2023 wore on, he tightened up his downfield throws to truly take advantage of the openings head coach Matt LaFleur and a deep young receiving corps created. This led to a comeback from a 3-6 start to a spot controlling the team’s playoff destiny in the final week of the season.
That emergence is reflected in this week’s quarterback rankings, where Love sits a hair outside the top 10. He hasn’t been *quite* that good when you crunch his game tape, but there’s no denying his talent on any given play — or his ability to brain fart his way into trouble on others. So if he’s not a top 10 quarterback, who is? Fortunately, we’ve got advanced stats to help us sort that out.
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 32 primary quarterbacks — the ones who played at least 272 snaps in 17 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 seven-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.