Dak Prescott is throwing interceptions at a career-worst rate. He’s had five since returning to the Dallas Cowboys’ lineup in Week 7.
But he’s been pretty good in every other facet of the game — including letting his running backs take over — and the Cowboys are 4-1 since then. Prescott is averaging more than 250 passing yards per game and has more touchdowns than turnovers and sacks combined. That’s led him to rise up the advanced stats leaderboard … all the way into third place thanks to a small sample size and some underwhelming opponents.
Prescott will almost certainly backslide at some point, but it might not come in the next three weeks with games against the Indianapolis Colts (who have a decent passing defense, but not top 10), Houston Texans and Jacksonville Jaguars (who do not) on the schedule. Would that be an accurate reflection on the Cowboy quarterback? Probably not, but it wouldn’t hurt to keep building him up in what’s been a more trying season than his numbers suggest.
Other movers this week include Trevor Lawrence (up four spots), Derek Carr (same) and Russell Wilson (down three spots and barely a top 30 quarterback). What else have we learned over 12 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 34 quarterbacks (minimum 176 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.
