Week 16 Bayesian Quarterback Rankings

Drake Maye establishing himself in the mid-tier, and Aaron Rodgers showing signs of life

The big, fundamental change to the rankings this season is the integration of Adjusted Quarterback Efficiency (AQE) numbers. This produces rankings that align more closely to what the typical football observer or data-based analysts would assign based on a combination of observation and statistics.

For the Week 1 projection, I weaved the AQE figures for 2023 and 2022 into the mix. In Week 2, I discovered the addition of prior years’ charting from FTNData, enabling us to go back to 2019 and calculate AQE. Because we’re shifting the historical data for several years in the new projections, the projection movement from Week 1 wouldn’t be primarily based on last week’s quarterback performances, but mostly on revisions to 2019-2021 efficiencies.

You can find all the previous weekly editions of the Bayesian Quarterback Rankings here, and the backlog for Adjusted Quarterback Efficiency is here.

COMPARING GRADES AND EFFICIENCY

PFF grades aren’t part of the analysis, but I find it helpful to make not of how they align with EPA per play, as many contextual elements of quarterback play (drops, interception-worthy throws, easier throws that become big gains, etc) are part of the grading methodology, but aren’t accounted for in EPA. At the same time, I think EPA does a vastly superior job of weighing what is and isn’t important in points-based results.

The plot below is a bit different than previous iterations of this post, substituting AQE for unadjusted EPA per play, and you might notice that the data has less dispersion (i.e. something like a higher r²) than using straight EPA. Even so, AQE doesn’t perfectly align with PFF grading, and you can decide which measure is more representative of fundamental quarterback play. (hint: it’s AQE!)

We continue to see NFC North quarterbacks Jordan Love, Jared Goff and, to a lesser degree, Sam Darnold outperform in adjusted EPA in relation to their PFF grading. The “truth” on how good these quarterbacks have been falls somewhere in between their relative rankings on these measures, but I’ll take AQE in the long-run.

Justin Herbert, Derek Carr, Geno Smith and Aaron Rodgers are veterans on the other side of the equation. There’s also disappointing second-year signal-caller C.J. Stroud, whose AQE has fallen outside the top-20.

The public perception of play between Russell Wilson and Justin Fields, if there is one, probably favors the former. There might be some truth in that when you look at PFF grading for evidence, but not much in actual on-the-field results.

PROJECTED ADJUSTED EFFICIENCY

These results are the ranking for the go-forward projections of adjusted quarterback efficiency starting this week. I also included the AQE rankings for each quarterback over the last five seasons (minimum 250 dropbacks) so you can see the evidence going into the projections. All of these ranks are now based on AQE, including the 2024 numbers.

Older data is decayed over time, so the 2023 and 2024 AQE data matters more than those from pre-2020. That said, older data can’t be fully discounted, or else you miss bounce-back performers of great quarterbacks returning to form, like Aaron Rodgers in 2020 and 2021.

“Percentile” is the mean (“best guess”) projection as a percentile of historical franchise quarterback results (min 2K career dropbacks).