There are several metrics that suggest Tua Tagovailoa, working with a new head coach and a massively upgraded offense, has made *the leap* in 2022. He leads the league in passer rating (112.7), QB rating (78.7) and yards per pass attempt (9.0). His 313 yards per game he’s been able to finish is second only to Josh Allen. His touchdown and completion rates are both top three.
And when it comes to advanced stats, he stands alone at the top of the quarterback mountain.
Tagovailoa ascended to the No. 1 spot when it comes to overall efficiency this fall, taking advantage of Patrick Mahomes’ week off and Allen’s late struggles against the Green Bay Packers. The Miami Dolphins’ third-year quarterback led his team back from a 10-point halftime deficit (against the Detroit Lions, but still) while throwing for 382 yards and three touchdowns without a turnover in Week 8.
That left everyone looking up at a player whose status as a franchise quarterback was uncertain back in August. Tagovailoa is 2022’s top passer so far. Now let’s see who comes next.
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 36 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.
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