NFL QB Tiers Week 5: Geno Smith makes his case and Joe Burrow, Jared Goff make leaps
For one week, at least, Geno Smith is the most efficient quarterback in the NFL.
The journeyman passer — a player subjected to a position battle with Drew Lock six weeks ago — has embraced his opportunity to lead the Seattle Seahawks. The man who was formerly Russell Wilson’s backup is soundly outplaying his former QB1 and, buoyed by an absolutely ridiculous completion rate, in the midst of the best four-game stretch of his career.
That’s good enough to push him ahead of Patrick Mahomes for the No. 1 spot a month into the season. What a time to be alive.
Of course, advanced stats can only tell you so much. It can’t quantify a play like this, which will continue to feel borderline impossible well into the future:
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 four games in the 2022 NFL season. 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 32 quarterbacks (minimum 64 plays) that looks like this:
via RBSDM.com
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.
There are a lot of players taking up the creamy middle ground, 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.
via RBSDM.com and the author