After two weeks, a limited sample size of painted Jacoby Brissett and Geno Smith as top 10 NFL quarterbacks. After three weeks … well, they’re *both* still up there.
The Cleveland Browns’ fill-in quarterback continued to build his value after a proficient Thursday Night Football performance. The athleticism that made him a value-play 2016 third round pick for a New England Patriots team with both Tom Brady and Jimmy Garoppolo on the roster was on display as Brissett avoided conflict in the pocket and threw absolute darts downfield.
Brissett finished his day with a 21-for-31, two touchdown, zero interception line in a 29-17 win over a division rival. He led four different scoring drives of at least 60 yards. And his night probably should have been even better!
absolute cannonshot off the chest pic.twitter.com/dkPFO6H95C
— Christian D'Andrea (@TrainIsland) September 23, 2022
Brissett’s Browns are one Nick Chubb red zone kneel-down from their first 3-0 start since 1993. Granted, those games have come against the Panthers, Jets and Steelers, but the journeyman backup has given Cleveland exactly what it needs to survive Deshaun Watson’s 11-game suspension following more than 20 accusations of sexual misconduct and what the NFL described as “predatory behavior.”
Smith, on the other hand, threw for 325 yards but lost to the Atlanta Falcons when his fourth-and-18 heave was intercepted with 90 seconds to play. That marred an otherwise solid performance — the third-highest yardage total of his career — that furthers the theory he’s a useful, if flawed, starting NFL quarterback.
But neither of these guys are elite. You know who is, per advanced stats? Tua Tagovailoa and Trevor Lawrence. Let’s see which quarterbacks are great and who truly stinks through three games in the 2022 NFL season. 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 33 quarterbacks (minimum 48 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.
Since there’s a big congestion in the middle, it’s a little tougher to legibly divide this week’s group into tiers. Fortunately, I’ll have a full explanation of who fits where below.
