For the second straight season, Joe Flacco has burst onto the scene like he’s offering bored children Kool-Aid. This time, instead of replacing a once-great quarterback who’s now irreparably washed, he’s taken over for a young, toolsy prospect who may not get there.
In 2023, Flacco replaced Deshaun Watson, the disgraced quarterback accused of more than 20 counts of sexual misconduct and what the NFL itself described as “predatory behavior” and helped guide the Cleveland Browns to the playoffs. He wasn’t great — his 0.048 adjusted expected points added per dropback ranked only 21st out of 41 passers to play at least 200 snaps in 2023 — but he was willing to throw deep and lit a fuse under an offense filled with underutilized explosives.
This fall, he’s been called in to replace Anthony Richardson. Unlike Watson, Richardson has no qualms throwing deep but has seen meager returns from these high risk, high reward scenarios. When he left Week 4’s game with a hip injury, Flacco stepped in. In fewer than two games worth of action he’s thrown seven deep balls and five touchdowns. Pair that with a 70 percent completion rate and he’s been good enough to be the league’s second-most efficient quarterback thanks to a tiny sample size.
Who clocks in ahead of, and directly behind, Flacco? 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 33 primary quarterbacks — the ones who played at least 80 snaps through five 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.
