A Josh Allen-Jayden Daniels-Lamar Jackson MVP race is gonna rule and Week 9 QB rankings

We’re nearly at the 2024 NFL season’s halfway mark. There are still plenty of games left to be played, but there’s a hierarchy developing in this year’s most valuable player race.

Some of the old standbys we expected are there. Lamar Jackson has a legitimate chance to defend his title. Josh Allen could finally break through this winter. Joe Burrow is searching for the wins to push him to the top of consideration.

But surprises linger. Patrick Mahomes is leading an undefeated team but playing some of the least efficient football of his career thanks to a depleted receiving corps and issues at left tackle. Aaron Rodgers’s quest for a fifth MVP has fizzled alongside the New York Jets’ playoff hopes. In their place, unexpected candidates like Jared Goff and Jayden Daniels have emerged.

Which of these quarterbacks has been the most effective through eight weeks? 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 32 primary quarterbacks — the ones who played at least 128 snaps through eight weeks — you get a chart that looks like this:

Welcome to the Tony Zone, Spencer Rattler! 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.