NFL QB Rankings before Week 4: Is Josh Allen finally gonna win MVP?
After three weeks of the 2024 season, Josh Allen is the NFL’s best quarterback. That’s good. That makes sense.
Right behind him in the rankings are Jayden Daniels and Malik Willis. That’s… less expected.
2024 has been the backdrop to some stunning performances. Daniels had a breakout game in his third NFL appearance, throwing only a pair of incompletions in an upset win over the Cincinnati Bengals on the road (and each was on throws 20-plus yards downfield). Willis is having a breakthrough in his third NFL season, entering the Green Bay Packers’ starting lineup in relief of Jordan Love and thriving in a run-heavy system.
It’s not all roses. Jared Goff and Dak Prescott each signed big contract extensions this offseason but have underwhelmed to start the year. Yet, their struggles seem like nothing compared to Trevor Lawrence, whose Jacksonville Jaguars are staring down an 0-3 start after handing him a $275 million contract in June.
Figuring out just who has been the best starting quarterback and who has been the worst is a difficult exercise meant to consume hours of daytime talk radio. Fortunately, we’ve got a metric to help figure that out.
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 32 primary quarterbacks — the ones who played at least 48 snaps through three weeks — you get a chart that looks like this:
Try to divide that into tiers and you get a chart that looks like this: