NFL Week 9 Quarterback Rankings

• Allen and Mahomes separating from the rest: Josh Allen and Patrick Mahomes stay in the top two spots, and they’ve separated from the field.
• Prescott rising: Dak Prescott is the biggest riser of the week after posting the second-best grading and efficiency in Week 8. He’s now No. 11 in the rankings.
• HOFers struggling: Older, Hall-of-Fame level quarterbacks continue to struggle in the rankings, including Tom Brady (12th), Aaron Rodgers (22nd) and Russell Wilson (24th).

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

For these rankings, I utilize a statistical technique called Bayesian Updating to solve the sample size issues. It is a method PFF has used many times in the past, notably when we looked at a number of different draft classes and why the New York Jets needed to draft a quarterback in 2021.

With Bayesian Updating, we can use the dynamics of the historical quarterback market and individual results to project their PFF grades and expected points added (EPA) per play. Even in a single season, there can be drastic differences in sample sizes for quarterbacks. This means that comparing unadjusted rate stats side by side can give too much credit to those who aren’t a big part of their offense and too little credit for those who dominate as their team's No. 1.

You can find details of how Bayesian Updating is implemented here, including a primer on how we build a posterior belief (or projection) based on historical quarterback results and then update the beliefs (projections) for each quarterback with their actual NFL results on a play-by-play basis.

CONTEXTUALIZE 2022 PERFORMANCE

Before I dive straight into the PFF analytical quarterback rankings, I’ve provided some visualizations to give proper context to how these quarterbacks performed in PFF grade and EPA per play and some important data splits that show the potential for regression moving forward.

Josh Allen owns the best PFF offensive grade and only trails Tua Tagovailoa in efficiency. Quarterbacks whose efficiency most exceeded our grading were Tagovailoa and Jimmy Garoppolo. On the flip side, Davis Mills and Aaron Rodgers have graded much better than their expected points based efficiency.