Toyotas are on sale, so Jordan Love is cooking.
For the second straight season, the Green Bay Packers quarterback is thriving after a slow start. In 2023, it could be attributed to adjusting to the game in his first season as a full time starter. In 2024, it was thanks to a slow recovery from a Week 1 lower leg injury.
Or it could be something else. One TikTok user pointed out Love’s surge last season coincided with Toyotathon — the auto giant’s annual holiday season sales event. Over on Reddit, one user deduced Love’s numbers while Camrys are marked down would make him the most efficient quarterback in NFL history. Indeed, the difference is stark:
Jordan Love before Toyotathon 2024:
Jordan Love during Toyotathon 2024:
Those latter numbers are enough to move Love into the top 10 of the quarterback rankings with just three weeks left in the regular season. 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 240 snaps through 15 weeks — you get a graphic that looks like this:
Allen’s EPA per play is in its own tier, even with a surprisingly pedestrian CPOE. If you attempt to split this graph into tiers, you get something that looks like this:
Yeah, it’s still a rough scene for Anthony Richardson. Let’s look at the full ranks.
