quarterback tiers – Syndication Server

2024 NFL Playoff Quarterback Rankings: Lamar Jackson, statistically, isn’t QB1

Wherein advanced stats like Mason Rudolph more than anyone who actually watches Mason Rudolph would.

The MVP of the 2023 regular season, barring an upset, will be Lamar Jackson. The best quarterback of the 2024 NFL Playoffs, according to advanced stats, is Brock Purdy.

Purdy’s highly efficient passing game made him the NFL’s top passer when it came to expected value this fall. While Kyle Shanahan’s offense and a roster loaded with healthy playmakers ensured he’d have a cushy landing for any drop-off, the second year quarterback still commanded a high-scoring, risk-averse passing game in a way Jimmy Garoppolo had been unable over the previous five seasons.

So where does that leave Jackson, Dak Prescott, Josh Allen and the rest of the league’s postseason quarterback, aside from behind him? Fortunately, we’ve got advanced stats to help us figure out a rough order.

Expected points added (EPA) is a concept that’s been around since 1970. It’s effectively a comparison between what an average quarterback could be expected to do on a certain down and what he actually did — and how it increased his team’s chances of scoring. The model we use comes from The Athletic’s Ben Baldwin and his RBSDM.com website, which is both wildly useful AND includes adjusted EPA, which accounts for defensive strength. It considers the impact of penalties and does not negatively impact passers for fumbles after a completion.

In order to accomodate 2024’s least utilized starter, we’ll drop the snap count threshold to 90 — exactly where Mason Rudolph landed in four games for the Pittsburgh Steelers. That leaves us with a crowded graph of 53 quarterbacks, most of whom ranged from mediocre to genuinely terrible in 2023.

That’s a lot to sort through. Let’s talk about the guys who are still playing football — but start with the ones who aren’t in order to temper expectations a little.

NFL QB Rankings, Week 18: Is Jordan Love a top 10 quarterback?

Love balances out big potential with boneheaded misfires. Is he good enough to join the league’s elite passers?

Jordan Love has the Green Bay Packers exactly where Aaron Rodgers left them: in need of a Week 18 win, at home against a surging divisional rival, to make the playoffs.

In 2023, that manifested in a 16-20 loss to the Detroit Lions in which Rodgers threw for only 205 yards with as many touchdowns (one) as interceptions. That’s the standard Love has to beat against a similarly ascendant team that had previously been the division’s doormat. The Chicago Bears enter the final week of the regular season with a 5-2 record in their last seven games. In that stretch, they’ve fielded the league’s toughest defense.

That’s going to make this January matchup much different than the last time these squads faced each other in September. It’s going to put an inconsistent, high-ceiling young quarterback to the test.

Love has been occasionally great and briefly awful in his first season as a full-time starter, sometimes within the same half of football. As 2023 wore on, he tightened up his downfield throws to truly take advantage of the openings head coach Matt LaFleur and a deep young receiving corps created. This led to a comeback from a 3-6 start to a spot controlling the team’s playoff destiny in the final week of the season.

That emergence is reflected in this week’s quarterback rankings, where Love sits a hair outside the top 10. He hasn’t been *quite* that good when you crunch his game tape, but there’s no denying his talent on any given play — or his ability to brain fart his way into trouble on others. So if he’s not a top 10 quarterback, who is? Fortunately, we’ve got advanced stats to help us sort that out.

The other piece of the puzzle is completion percentage over expected (CPOE), which is pretty much what it sounds like. It’s a comparison of all the completions a quarterback would be expected to make versus the ones he actually did. Like EPA, it can veer into the negatives and higher is better. So if you chart all 32 primary quarterbacks — the ones who played at least 272 snaps in 17 weeks — you get a chart that looks like this:

Top right hand corner is good. Bottom left corner is bad. Try splitting those passers visually into tiers and you get an imperfect seven-layer system that looks like this:

These rankings are sorted by a composite of adjusted EPA and CPOE to better understand who has brought the most — and the least — value to their teams across the small sample size. It’s not a full exploration of a player’s value, but it’s a viable starting point. Let’s take a closer look.

NFL QB Rankings, Week 17: Brock Purdy may be too good to catch, even after getting exploded by the Ravens

Purdy’s no longer MVP candidate, but his lead as 2023’s most efficient QB may be insurmountable.

Look, the numbers say Brock Purdy is the NFL’s best quarterback. Even if he followed up Week 16’s bed-wetting against the Baltimore Ravens with two more brutal implosions in Weeks 17 and 18, he’d probably finish 2023 as this season’s most efficient quarterback.

That, of course, doesn’t mean he’ll be league MVP.

Purdy vacated his spot as betting favorite thanks to Christmas night’s four-interception performance. In his place rose Lamar Jackson, who had two touchdowns and just under 300 total yards in Santa Clara. Jackson’s numbers aren’t wholly impressive; even advanced stats paint him as a top 10 quarterback instead of a top three guy. But he’s impossible to quantify thanks to his ability to flip a game on its axis with a single play, whether it’s on the ground or through the air.

Well, let’s see who lies between the top-ranked Purdy and No. 10 Jackson.

The other piece of the puzzle is completion percentage over expected (CPOE), which is pretty much what it sounds like. It’s a comparison of all the completions a quarterback would be expected to make versus the ones he actually did. Like EPA, it can veer into the negatives and higher is better. So if you chart all 31 primary quarterbacks — the ones who played at least 256 snaps in 16 weeks — you get a chart that looks like this:

Top right hand corner is good. Bottom left corner is bad. Try splitting those passers visually into tiers and you get an imperfect eight-layer system that looks like this:

NFL QB Rankings, Week 16: Brock Purdy, MVP (Zach Wilson, LVP)

It’s getting near impossible to catch Purdy on the 2023 QB leaderboard.

Yes, Brock Purdy landed in the perfect spot for a flawed-but-accurate quarterback. The San Francisco 49ers have long cried out for a passer who can make the right reads and escape the baffling decisions and occasionally awful throws of the Jimmy Garoppolo era — an era that resulted in three trips to the NFC title game or beyond in the last four years, by the way.

That need resulted in an offense that creates swaths of wide open space and trusts its playmakers to capitalize on it. The 49ers have led the league in yards after the catch in five of the last six seasons, including in 2023. This year, they’re profiting from a full campaign from Christian McCaffrey, who is on pace to be just the sixth player in NFL history to score 25 total touchdowns.

The man in the middle is Purdy, who is recording one of the most efficient seasons of quarterbacking in NFL history. His 119.0 passer rating would rank fifth-best all time. His 0.405 adjusted expected points added (EPA) per play is higher than Patrick Mahomes’ in either his 2022 MVP season (0.305) or 2018 MVP season (0.380). He leads the league in touchdown passes, touchdown rate, yards per attempt, adjusted yards per attempt and, well, just about any efficiency statistic you can measure.

That’s why he’s at the top of this week’s quarterback rankings once more — and why the gulf between him and the next closest competitor has widened. Purdy threw four touchdown passes in a sterling performance against the overmatched Arizona Cardinals. Dak Prescott, his closest competition when it came to both advanced stats and MVP odds coming into Week 15, sputtered in a blowout loss to the Buffalo Bills.

So where’s that leave Prescott, aside from “behind Brock Purdy?” Let’s crunch some numbers.

The other piece of the puzzle is completion percentage over expected (CPOE), which is pretty much what it sounds like. It’s a comparison of all the completions a quarterback would be expected to make versus the ones he actually did. Like EPA, it can veer into the negatives and higher is better. So if you chart all 31 primary quarterbacks — the ones who played at least 240 snaps in 15 weeks — you get a chart that looks like this:

Top right hand corner is good. Bottom left corner is bad. Try splitting those passers visually into tiers and you get an imperfect eight-layer system that looks like this:

NFL QB Rankings, Week 15: Zach Wilson is no longer the league’s worst starting quarterback (!)

Brock Purdy remains No. 1. You know who isn’t No. 31 anymore? The Jets’ forgotten baby boy.

We’ve talked a lot about the very good quarterbacks in these rankings. Today, let’s talk about the bad ones.

Specifically the ones in New York.

Week 14 was an opportunity to throw away past results and future expectations and just enjoy the ride. Zach Wilson played the best game of his career and the Jets dusted the Houston Texans. Tommy DeVito took another step toward become a bonafide sensation in the Giants’ comeback win over the Green Bay Packers. Each were top five quarterbacks for one week despite being left for dead earlier in the season.

Alas, we know it won’t last. Wilson is Wilson, the quarterback with exceptional traits but a glaring inability to put them all together. He’s the same guy Jets players were publicly clamoring to replace with a 40-year-old.

And if you’d like to anoint DeVito, that’s fine.There’s no denying he’s outplayed whatever meager expectations he’d earned as an undrafted free agent this year. He’s a fun player with a gloriously New Jersey upbringing who addresses football with a “play hard, die pretty” ethos on the field.

But don’t get too invested. We’ve seen this before. It rarely ends well.
DeVito is the latest overlooked quarterback to excel thanks, in part, to the overarching lack of game tape for opposing coordinators to parse.

Nick Mullens did it six years ago with the San Francisco 49ers. On Sunday he came off the bench to relieve Joshua Dobbs, who took advantage with opponents’ lack of familiarity for two different teams in 2023. Dobbs outplayed expectations, soared to great heights then came crashing back to about where we expected for both the Arizona Cardinals and Minnesota Vikings this fall.

Odds are, DeVito’s going to start regressing. Same with Wilson. But they crushed it in Week 14 and stated their respective cases as “NOT THE WORST STARTING QUARTERBACK IN THE NFL,” which is nice. Now let’s see who is, per advanced stats.

The other piece of the puzzle is completion percentage over expected (CPOE), which is pretty much what it sounds like. It’s a comparison of all the completions a quarterback would be expected to make versus the ones he actually did. Like EPA, it can veer into the negatives and higher is better. So if you chart all 31 primary quarterbacks — the ones who played at least 224 snaps in 14 weeks — you get a chart that looks like this:

Top right hand corner is good. Bottom left corner is bad. Try splitting those passers visually into tiers and you get an imperfect eight-layer system that looks like this:

NFL QB Rankings, Week 14: Holy moly, is Brock Purdy really 2023’s MVP?

Advanced stats affirm what the betting odds tell us; Brock Purdy is 2023’s most valuable player … so far.

There’s a lot to unpack about Brock Purdy’s 2023. He is, indeed, the NFL’s most efficient quarterback. He does lead the league in yards per attempt and yards per completion. Each time he drops back to throw the ball, he’s effectively good for a first down (9.7 yards per pass).

But he’s also a low wattage offensive custodian who has thrown fewer deep balls than Zach Wilson (32 to 30, per SIS). His average air yards per pass (7.9) is only 14th-deepest in the NFL. His 69.9 percent on-target throw rate is 26th-best among starters, just ahead of Kenny Pickett. He’s heavily buoyed by a core of playmakers whose 6.6 yards after catch average is by far the highest of any team this fall.

Despite all this, he’s still the NFL’s most impactful quarterback, according to advanced stats. In fact, no one else is quite on his level.

Let’s talk about those stats. Expected points added (EPA) is a concept that’s been around since 1970. It’s effectively a comparison between what an average quarterback could be expected to do on a certain down and what he actually did — and how it increased his team’s chances of scoring. The model we use comes from The Athletic’s Ben Baldwin and his RBSDM.com website, which is both wildly useful AND includes adjusted EPA, which accounts for defensive strength. It considers the impact of penalties and does not negatively impact passers for fumbles after a completion.

The other piece of the puzzle is completion percentage over expected (CPOE), which is pretty much what it sounds like. It’s a comparison of all the completions a quarterback would be expected to make versus the ones he actually did. Like EPA, it can veer into the negatives and higher is better. So if you chart all 31 primary quarterbacks — the ones who played at least 208 snaps in 13 weeks — you get a chart that looks like this:

Top right hand corner is good. Bottom left corner is bad. Try splitting those passers visually into tiers and you get an imperfect eight-layer system that looks like this:

NFL QB Rankings, Week 13: Who says Josh Allen can’t be MVP (aside from the standings)?

Allen’s a top three quarterback, but his Bills can’t make him an MVP. Dak Prescott, on the other hand…

Barring a significant turnaround in western New York, Josh Allen will not be 2023’s regular season MVP. But maybe he should be.

The high variance quarterback showcased his dizzying highs in a 420-yard, four touchdown performance against the Philadelphia Eagles in Week 12. But he failed to come away with a win thanks to a defense that’s been riddled with injuries and some poorly timed miscommunications in a 34-37 overtime defeat. That left his Buffalo Bills at 6-6 and, per the New York Times’ postseason predictor, with just a 15 percent shot at a playoff bid.

Teams that fail to qualify for the second season rarely produce MVP candidates. But Allen remains in the argument over the league’s top quarterback even as his house crumbles around him. Sure, it helps that no one has been especially dominant in a season without a clear-cut MVP favorite. But Allen has been better than an interception number that suggests he’s merely upstate Jameis Winston.

The numbers bear this out. Per advanced stats, the Bills can boast a top three quarterback, even if he comes without a postseason start this winter.

The other piece of the puzzle is completion percentage over expected (CPOE), which is pretty much what it sounds like. It’s a comparison of all the completions a quarterback would be expected to make versus the ones he actually did. Like EPA, it can veer into the negatives and higher is better. So if you chart all 33 primary quarterbacks — the ones who played at least 192 snaps in 12 weeks — you get a chart that looks like this:

Top right hand corner is good. Bottom left corner is bad. Try splitting those passers visually into tiers and you get an imperfect eight-layer system that looks like this:

NFL QB Rankings, Week 4: Joe Burrow stays tethered to the bottom

Meanwhile, Brock Purdy ascends as 2023’s most efficient player … for now.

Two things stand about about the NFL’s quarterback pecking order after four weeks. Brock Purdy probably can’t be this good. And Joe Burrow certainly isn’t this bad.

Purdy has ascended to the top spot in the rankings, supplanting Tua Tagovailoa following Sunday’s weak showing against a brutal Buffalo Bills defense. He’s utilizing his playmakers to perfection and, importantly, making his deep shots count, connecting on all five of his throws of 10-plus yards in a rout of the Cardinals — and winging all five completions to a rising Brandon Aiyuk.

Burrow, sputtering engine behind the 1-3 Cincinnati Bengals, has moved in the opposite direction. He has a single completion on only 10 passes that have traveled at least 20 yards downfield and is completing only 31.5 percent of his throws that make it 10-plus yards from the line of scrimmage. A nagging calf injury has left him a mess and stars like Ja’Marr Chase underutilized and frustrated.

We’re roughly a quarter of the way through the 2023 regular season and there’s plenty of time for things to change. But as it stands Purdy looks like the second coming of Tom Brady and a hobbled Burrow is playing like slightly shorter Brock Osweiler. This would be very difficult to explain to someone just a year ago, yet here we are. The NFL is a weird place, man.

What about the 32 players between them in the rankings? We’ve got advanced stats that can tell us where they stand after four games.

Let’s talk about these numbers. Expected points added (EPA) is a concept that’s been around since 1970. It’s effectively a comparison between what an average quarterback could be expected to do on a certain down and what he actually did — and how it increased his team’s chances of scoring. The model we use comes from The Athletic’s Ben Baldwin and his RBSDM.com website, which is both wildly useful AND includes adjusted EPA, which accounts for defensive strength. It considers the impact of penalties and does not negatively impact passers for fumbles after a completion.

The other piece of the puzzle is completion percentage over expected (CPOE), which is pretty much what it sounds like. It’s a comparison of all the completions a quarterback would be expected to make versus the ones he actually did. Like EPA, it can veer into the negatives and higher is better. So if you chart all 34 primary quarterbacks — the ones who played at least 64 snaps in four weeks — you get a chart that looks like this:

Top right hand corner is good. Bottom left corner is bad. Try splitting those passers into tiers and you get an imperfect eight-layer system that looks like this:

NFL Quarterback Rankings, Week 15: Is it time to worry about Tua Tagovailoa?

Patrick Mahomes threw three interceptions in Week 14 and *still* took over the top QB spot thanks to Tagovailoa’s horrible night.

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.