The Seattle Seahawks are 6-3 and leading their division behind the strength of a top five quarterback. The Denver Broncos are 3-5 and only have the listless Raiders cushioning them from the bottom of the AFC West thanks to their garbage offense.
This was not the intention when Denver shipped two first round picks and more to the Pacific Northwest for Russell Wilson.
Wilson was supposed to be the redeemer in Colorado, a Peyton Manning-esque savior capable of pushing an elite defense back to contention. Instead, his Broncos are holding on to a thin wisp of playoff hope and the former Seahawk has been, statistically, a bottom 10 quarterback. Seattle, on the other hand, has seen its defense rise to Geno Smith’s level in the midst of a four-game winning streak that has the team atop the NFC West.
Wilson’s slide isn’t an outlier; he’s one of several big name quarterbacks who are having a forgettable start to their 2022. What does the new ruling class of passers look like? Through half the regular season, we’ve got a fairly well-developed picture.
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 37 quarterbacks (minimum 112 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.
