Josh Allen doesn’t lead this week’s quarterback rankings. His decent, not incredible, completion rate held him back in the formula.
This does not mean Josh Allen is not the best quarterback in the NFL, because he is.
Allen’s six touchdown performance in Week 14 may have given him the unique honor of vaulting into undisputed most valuable player territory in a loss. Buffalo’s defense couldn’t handle Matthew Stafford on the road — more on that later — but Allen kept the AFC East champion Bills alive into the waning seconds thanks to three touchdowns each through the air and on land.
We know where Allen stands. Who’s ahead of him? Who is nipping at his heels? And who has been 2024’s most frustrating quarterback?
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 224 snaps through 14 weeks — you get a graphic that looks like this:
Suffice to say, you don’t want your quarterback to wind up in the bottom right quadrant. That area is currently a turf war between Anthony Richardson and Cooper Rush, one of whom may be able to escape and one who probably will not. 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.
