The year is 2024. Russell Wilson is playing like a top 10 quarterback for a division-leading team led by one of the game’s most successful head coaches.
Over the previous two seasons, those clauses seemed like either/or propositions. Wilson was a massive pickup in the Denver Broncos quest to erase a playoff drought that dates back to Peyton Manning’s playing days. Instead of leading the franchise to prosperity, the Broncos wound up paying a $75 million premium just to ensure he wouldn’t play for them after 2023. This led him to the Pittsburgh Steelers, who’d been a glowing sigil of mediocre quarterback play from the moment Ben Roethlisberger turned 37.
Despite this confluence, Wilson has thrived in Pittsburgh. The Steelers are 9-3 and 1.5 games ahead of the Baltimore Ravens — a team they beat in Week 11 — in the AFC North standings. Wilson missed time to start the season, but his play has added a new dimension to the Pittsburgh offense thanks to his consistency, stability and downfield passing ability. The veteran’s passer rating and yards per attempt are both the highest they’ve been since 2020.
That hasn’t been enough to make him the NFL’s best quarterback, but it puts him in the top 10 through 13 weeks. Who joins him? 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 208 snaps through 13 weeks — you get a graphic that looks like this:
Welcome to the show, Cooper Rush. You’re officially the only qualified quarterback less efficient than Anthony Richardson. 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.
