Jared Goff is thriving in an offense stocked with playmakers and one of the league’s most highly regarded minds calling plays as coordinator. By those powers combined, he’s the NFL’s most efficient quarterback through two-thirds of the 2024 season — but he’s only got the fourth-best odds of any player to win regular season most valuable player honors.
That’s better than Tua Tagovailoa, whose season has been marred by a head injury that simultaneously allowed him to showcase his value in Miami. Tagovailoa has the Dolphins on a three-game winning streak that has them back in the playoff hunt (sort of). He’s been able to maximize returns from his non-Tyreek Hill players, including Jonnu Smith and Jaylen Waddle. But with his team at 5-6 and having missed four-plus games, his MVP argument is, well, a rough sled.
Which quarterback has been the best through Week 12? Fortunately, we’ve got some advanced stats to help figure that out.
Expected points added 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 35 primary quarterbacks — the ones who played at least 192 snaps through 12 weeks — you get a chart that looks like this:
Anthony Richardson is in a pretty deep hole, even if he’s not as bad as he seems. If you split up the rest of the league’s starters into tiers, it looks something like this:
Let’s see how this week’s rankings shook out.
