Hurts did it again.
Down 4 with 11 minutes to go in the game, on 3rd-and-15 from the Bills 29 in a must-convert situation, Hurts hits Olamide Zaccheus in the back of the endzone to put the Eagles ahead.
NextGen Stats had this throw with a 14.6% chance of being completed, the best and most unlikely completion of Jalen Hurts‘ career so far.
Read that again. A 14% chance of being completed and it was in one of the biggest situations. If you watched the Iron Bowl this weekend, it was eerily similar to that game-winning pass that had Twitter ablaze.
Hurts continues to hit improbable passes
I wrote just a few weeks ago after the Dallas game how a couple of Jalen Hurt’s throws stuck out to me and led me to dig into them deeper. What I found was Hurts is already the top QB in improbable completion rate, defined as top 1% CPOE (completion percentage over expected), since at least 2000.
If you aren’t familiar with CPOE, it just measures a pass vs. its expected completion rate. From decades of data, we know how likely a pass is to be completed based on game situations like how far it was thrown, receiver separation, etc. There are multiple stats like this, NextGen Stats has the best one which uses player tracking data but CPOE is the publicly available one.
What we see every week and know intuitively – that Hurts is hitting really tough passes – is absolutely right and, if anything, we aren’t realizing how good he is and how well he stacks up against the game’s great passers.
This year Hurts has 5 of these top passes, already well on pace to beat his 2022 total of 7. Only 11 QBs have more than one this year and only Russell Wilson and Tua have 3 each.
But it’s more than improbable completions – these are at the biggest moments
Then I looked at the most impactful passes – not only the tough to complete ones, but the ones that come at the most important times. For this, I am used EPA (expected points added) and WPA (win percentage added).
Like CPOE, EPA and WPA are built from decades worth of game data. EPA measures how many points a play is either expected to add or subtract from the game – a long pass gets you closer to the end zone, meaning the chance of scoring goes up. A sack is the opposite. For WPA, it measures how much a play raised or lowered a team’s chance of winning a game.
And again, Hurts stands out as one of the all-time greats already. If you look at throws that were both 99th percentile CPOE and 99th percentile EPA, Hurts already has two of the top five seasons.
| QB | Season | # of 99th percentile passes | Total EPA from top passes | Win % Added |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Russell Wilson | 2020 | 8 | 41.07 | 116.2% |
| Tom Brady | 2020 | 7 | 34.28 | 80.7% |
| Josh Allen | 2022 | 7 | 37.97 | 81.0% |
| Jalen Hurts | 2022 | 7 | 35.17 | 85.3% |
| Jalen Hurts | 2023* | 5 | 24.20* | 69.6% |
| Pat Mahomes | 2019 | 5 | 24.80 | 38.9% |
And Hurts this season shows up with only 11 games complete. Over 17 games, Hurts is on pace for 8 of these top throws and 37.40 total EPA gained which would be good for one of the top seasons ever.
Some of the names that show up with top passes are obscure as every QB in the league has enough talent (or luck) to hit these occasionally. But when you zoom out and a QB hits these regularly, over and over in the biggest situations, it is special.
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