NFL QB Rankings, Week 4: Joe Burrow stays tethered to the bottom

Two things stand about about the NFL’s quarterback pecking order after four weeks. Brock Purdy probably can’t be this good. And Joe Burrow certainly isn’t this bad.

Purdy has ascended to the top spot in the rankings, supplanting Tua Tagovailoa following Sunday’s weak showing against a brutal Buffalo Bills defense. He’s utilizing his playmakers to perfection and, importantly, making his deep shots count, connecting on all five of his throws of 10-plus yards in a rout of the Cardinals — and winging all five completions to a rising Brandon Aiyuk.

Burrow, sputtering engine behind the 1-3 Cincinnati Bengals, has moved in the opposite direction. He has a single completion on only 10 passes that have traveled at least 20 yards downfield and is completing only 31.5 percent of his throws that make it 10-plus yards from the line of scrimmage. A nagging calf injury has left him a mess and stars like Ja’Marr Chase underutilized and frustrated.

We’re roughly a quarter of the way through the 2023 regular season and there’s plenty of time for things to change. But as it stands Purdy looks like the second coming of Tom Brady and a hobbled Burrow is playing like slightly shorter Brock Osweiler. This would be very difficult to explain to someone just a year ago, yet here we are. The NFL is a weird place, man.

What about the 32 players between them in the rankings? We’ve got advanced stats that can tell us where they stand after four games.

Let’s talk about these numbers. 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 34 primary quarterbacks — the ones who played at least 64 snaps in four weeks — you get a chart that looks like this:

Top right hand corner is good. Bottom left corner is bad. Try splitting those passers into tiers and you get an imperfect eight-layer system that looks like this:

These rankings are sorted by a composite of adjusted EPA and CPOE to better understand who has brought the most — and the least — value to their teams across the small sample size. It’s not a full exploration of a player’s value, but it’s a viable starting point. Let’s take a closer look.