The final weekend of the 2023 NFL regular season kicked off with a rainstorm and two backup quarterbacks. In the end, Mason Rudolph led the Pittsburgh Steelers into playoff position by toppling Tyler Huntley’s Baltimore Ravens.
It’s been that kind of year in the NFL; one defined by unexpected gunslingers occasionally thriving but mostly struggling behind center. 2023 will be the year that guys like Dorian Thompson-Robinson, Tommy DeVito, Tyson Bagent, C.J. Beathard, Bailey Zappe and Jaren Hall all earned starts. Injuries and ineffectiveness helped bring scoring to a five-year low, down nearly six points per game from 2020.
This left the capacity for entirely too many awful quarterback performances. But most of them were uninteresting slogs from players from whom we’d come to expect nothing. What this weekly column has dived into is the quarterbacks who were supposed to be great — or at least passably good or even unremarkable but consistent — and then fell flat on their faces for one game.
Friends, there have been a lot of them. 2023 saw stars like Patrick Mahomes, Joe Burrow and Josh Allen all drop stinkers in the middle of flawed seasons. And it didn’t matter all that much in the long run, because everyone was at least kinda-sorta lowkey flawed this fall. Week 18, despite its lack of big names amongst a field of meaningless games, added a final chapter to that lore.
So who was Week 18’s grossest quarterback?
Fortunately, we’ve got tools to better understand just how damaging each underwhelming performances was. Using the advanced stat expected points added (EPA) can gauge how much a quarterback brings to the table compared to a typical player.
By comparing each passer’s Week 18 EPA against their 2023 adjusted average, we get a better picture of just how frustrating their days were. And we can find both of those thanks to The Athletic’s Ben Baldwin and his incredibly useful stats sites RBSDM.com and HabitatRing.com. So let’s take a look at who disappointed the most in the final weekend of the 2023 season.