The San Francisco 49ers’ Week 6 loss was Tua Tagovailoa’s gain.
The fourth-year quarterback, on pace for career highs of 5,300 passing yards and 40 touchdowns, has regained his place at the top of the quarterback rankings … at least for now. His shiny traditional stats — he ranks first or tied for first in total yardage, touchdown passes and passer rating — also translate to advanced stats. So when Purdy backslid to the worst day of his budding NFL career in rainy Cleveland, Tagovailoa was there to take advantage.
That duo, along with Josh Allen, make up a narrow top tier of quarterbacks through six weeks. The gap between them and the rest of the league’s top passers, however, has gotten smaller in a season where aerial offenses haven’t quite lived up to the NFL’s recent standard. So while Tagovailoa has the edge for now, there’s always the chance Patrick Mahomes (of course) or Jared Goff (whoa) could catch them while building a convincing MVP argument.
Let’s talk about those numbers. 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 33 primary quarterbacks — the ones who played at least 96 snaps in six weeks — you get a chart that looks like this:
Top right hand corner is good. Bottom left corner is bad. Try splitting those passers 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.