Patrick Mahomes, absurd playground football touchdown pass aside, didn’t have a great performance in Week 14. He threw three interceptions to gave the Denver Broncos a puncher’s chance in a game Kansas City once led 27-0.
Despite this, he rose to No. 1 in the advanced stats quarterback rankings because the former king, Tua Tagovailoa, was absolutely dreadful. Tagovailoa was lost against the Chargers’ modified cover-two defense, completing only 10 of 28 passes in a Sunday Night Football letdown. It was his second straight disappointing game and the Miami Dolphins’ second-straight defeat.
That’s created a two-man race to see who can be 2022’s most efficient quarterback. Mahomes has been the more resilient passer of the two. While he’s on pace for a career-worst 14 interceptions, he also leads the league in passing yards and touchdown passes.
Tagovailoa, conversely, followed up a disappointing Week 13 game with his worst performance of 2022. That’s dropped his completion rate from 69.7 percent to 65.5 and his passer rating from a league-best 115.7 to a merely very good 108.2. He’s going to have to rebound in a big way to push Mahomes or Jalen Hurts for MVP honors, but a stretch like his nine-touchdown, zero-turnover run between Weeks 8 and 10 would put him back in the running.
Those two have risen above the fray, but they aren’t above reproach, especially since late-season fades remain a very real possibility. Who else could challenge for the top spot? Let’s take a look at the numbers.
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 33 quarterbacks (minimum 208 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.
