The surprise isn’t that Derek Carr is playing this well. It’s that he’s racking up gaudy numbers while hardly having to throw the ball to a thin receiving corps.
Carr’s five touchdown passes in two weeks are tied for the league lead (with Baker Mayfield and one ahead of Sam Darnold. We’ll get there). His 39 pass attempts are 31st-most in the NFL and would be dead last among starting quarterback had Jordan Love not been injured in Week 1. As a result, Carr is throwing a touchdown on better than one in eight attempts.
His 11.4 yards per pass attempt are nearly two full yards more than second-place Mayfield. He’s got a passer rating of 142.4 and a QBR of 96.2. He is, in the New Orleans Saints’ 2-0 start, dang near perfect.
This will not last, at least at this rate. Carr has long been an underrated passer, but his 30s have been the backdrop to clean, efficient and generally underwhelming quarterbacking. The Saints saw something more than the Las Vegas Raiders did and signed him to a contract worth $150 million, only to see him play almost the entire 2023 season hurt. While he’s currently maximizing his returns from Chris Olave, Rashid Shaheed and Alvin Kamara (all very good, even if Kamara’s odometer is reaching unpleasant levels), there’s little reliable depth behind them.
For now, let’s enjoy the small sample size. Let’s bask in Carr putting up video game numbers for an offense yet to be held to fewer than 40 points. Eventually he’ll degrade from “historic” to merely “pretty good” and it will be enough to keep New Orleans in the playoff hunt barring injury. For now, he’s the NFL’s best quarterback.
Who comes after him? 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 32 snaps through two weeks — you get a chart that looks like this:
Try to divide that into tiers and you get a chart that looks like this:
