Jayden Daniels remains 2024's top NFL quarterback in our Week 7 rankings
The bad news for Anthony Richardson is, with Bryce Young no longer taking snaps, he’s the NFL’s worst quarterback. The good news is he’s slated to return from a hip injury in Week 7 to dig himself out of the hole he’s created.
Richardson gets a favorable matchup against the Miami Dolphins’ middling pass defense and a chance to rise up the quarterback ranks and prove he’s a viable franchise building block. He’s got a long way to go to catch up to Jayden Daniels, another young passer with SEC roots who, unexpectedly, as emerged as 2024’s most efficient quarterback through six games.
Who fills out the ranking between Daniels and Richardson? Fortunately, we’ve got some advanced stats 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 96 snaps through six weeks — you get a chart that looks like this:
Try to divide that into tiers and you get a chart that looks like this:
Let’s see how this week’s rankings shook out.