C.J. Stroud is a bottom 10 quarterback, Joe Burrow is doing this for nothing and Week 11 QB ranks
The Houston Texans should be worried.
Not about their place atop the AFC South, that’s secure. About the young quarterback who has spent his second season in the league regressing from his rookie of the year form.
C.J. Stroud has been a mess this fall. His passer rating has dropped a full 10 points from his brilliant 2023 campaign. His expected points added (EPA) has flipped from 35.3 last season — seventh-best in the NFL — to -17.3, which ranks 21st. In Week 10, his inability to put a single second-half point on the board at home allowed the Detroit Lions to rally from a 16-point deficit and win a game in which Jared Goff threw five interceptions.
This is all very, very troubling. I’ll get into what’s gone wrong for Stroud in 2024 and if any fixes are coming below. But for now, I’m interested in figuring out where he sits in the NFL’s pecking order. Which quarterback has been the best through Week 10? 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 160 snaps through 10 weeks — you get a chart that looks like this:
Anthony Richardson’s spot in what’s effectively his own quadrant may play a role in the Indianapolis Colts’ refusal to swap Joe Flacco out of the starting lineup while a glimmer of playoff hope remains. 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.