The New York Giants are 6-1 and have the second-best record in the NFC. All of this has been made possible by their top 10 quarterback, Daniel Jones.
That is an absolutely wild pair of sentences to write and, per the NFL’s advanced stats, a completely true one. Jones has led four fourth quarter comebacks and five game winning drives in seven appearances this season. In Week 7, he erased a 17-13 Jacksonville Jaguars lead with less than six minutes to play with a one-yard touchdown plunge. Minutes later, he led a 61-yard field goal drive that added vital insurance points.
Granted, that hasn’t been a heavy lift through the air — that final drive didn’t feature a single pass. Still, Jones has been his most efficient self despite an offense where his top three healthy, non-tailback targets are Richie James, Darius Slayton and Daniel Bellinger.
So yeah … he has a solid case for that top 10 status. Now let’s figure out who joined him after seven weeks of the 2022 NFL season.
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 38 quarterbacks (minimum 64 plays) 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.
