NFL Quarterback Rankings, Week 16: Patrick Mahomes extends his lead (and Jalen Hurts can't catch him)

21.12.2022 19:31

Mahomes has breathing room between himself and the rest of the NFL's QBs. Jalen Hurts' injury may have sealed his crown.

The data backs up what Kansas City Chiefs fans have known for a long, long time. Patrick Mahomes is the most valuable quarterback in the NFL.

Mahomes and Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts have passed the top odds for league’s most valuable player award back and forth throughout the back end of the 2022 season. Now that a reported shoulder sprain seems destined to cut Hurts’ campaign short, it feels like a predetermined result that the man with the $500 million contract will add his second MVP award to an already distinguished resume.

Even a rejuvenated Hurts, or the players directly behind him — Tua Tagovailoa, Joe Burrow, Geno Smith somehow — would have a difficult time catching Mahomes in the advanced stats rankings. The Kansas City star hasn’t just built his castle in 2022 but dug a moat to separate him from the very good quarterbacks trying to usurp his claim.

There’s plenty of intrigue further down the ranks. Both Trevor Lawrence and Jared Goff have overcome uneven 2021 seasons and awful starts to 2022 to lead their teams into the playoff hunt as top 10 passers. Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers, well, still kinda stink. And Zach Wilson has been slightly less embarrassing in his role as the Jets’ fill-in starter. For now.

What else do advanced stats tell us about this year’s starting quarterbacks?

We know the data is limited — but it does give us a pretty good idea of who has risen to the occasion this fall. Let’s see which quarterbacks are great and who truly stinks through seven weeks. These numbers are from the NFL’s Next Gen Stats model but compiled by the extremely useful RBSDM.com, run by The Athletic’s Ben Baldwin and Sebastian Carl.

Using expected points added (EPA, the value a quarterback adds on any given play compared to the average NFL result) along with completion percentage over expected (CPOE, the percent of his passes that are caught that aren’t expected to be in typical NFL situations) gives us a scatter plot of 33 quarterbacks (minimum 224 plays) that looks like this:

The size of each dot represents the amount of plays they’ve been a part of. A place in the top right means you’re above average in both EPA and CPOE. A place in the bottom left suggests things have gone horribly wrong (i.e. Baker Mayfield).

There are a lot of players taking up the creamy middle ground and some strange outliers, making it tough to separate this year’s average quarterbacks into tiers. Here’s my crack at it, but full details follow in the text below.