Performance on zero-graded throws, and what it can tell us about quarterback play

• Josh Allen turned routine throws into explosive production: Allen led all qualified quarterbacks in 2025 with 6.59 yards per attempt and 0.173 EPA per attempt on zero-graded throws, standing alone as the only passer above 0.10 EPA per attempt.

• Kyle Shanahan's offenses dominate the historical leaderboards: Jimmy Garoppolo, Brock Purdy and Nick Mullens all rank among the career leaders on zero-graded throws, illustrating how elite offensive structure can consistently maximize expected plays.

• Find a more detailed breakdown of every quarterback's performance in the 2026 NFL QB Annual: See complete quarterback profiles, advanced metrics and passing splits for 43 qualifying quarterbacks from the 2025 season.

The QB Annual Is Live

Every qualifying quarterback. Every metric that matters. PFF grades, passing splits, EPA per dropback, clutch performance, interception luck and more — all in one interactive guide built on the same data trusted by all 32 NFL teams.

Read the QB Annual (opens in new tab) Get PFF+ (opens in new tab)

If you've ever spent any time around PFF content or studied its grading system, you'll already know that every pass PFF grades receives a score from -2 to +2, in half-point increments.

The throws that land exactly on 0 are, by design, unremarkable. There is no exceptional decision. You won't see it on a highlights show or the condensed-game replay. A zero-graded throw is the “control group” of quarterback play — simply a quarterback doing his job, making a play that an NFL quarterback would be expected to make.

Editor's note: Find out more about PFF's grading process by clicking here.

To some, a dataset of nothing but zero-graded throws would be incredibly boring. But those throws can make for an incredibly interesting study when viewed through the right lens.

Removing the extraordinary — for better or worse — leaves a cleaner look at how quarterbacks and offenses operate within the scheme's structure. It becomes less a study of football's most unremarkable throws and more a study of efficiency: how consistently quarterbacks execute what's asked of them, how offenses create production through design and how those two elements work together to generate successful plays.

20 years of unspectacular plays

Across 221,438 zero-graded attempts since 2006, the league has averaged 5.17 yards per attempt and -0.060 expected points added (EPA) per attempt.

Only one season in 20 has produced a net positive result. Every other year, including 2025, left offenses worse off on average when the passer did nothing above what was expected.

EPA per attempt climbed from a two-year trough after 2012 but never escaped negative territory for long, and the last three seasons have been among the weakest in the sample, with 2023’s -0.117 standing as the worst season on record.

Yards per attempt climbed from 4.80 to a 2014 peak of 5.48, coinciding with a league-wide passing spike, then settled into a 5.2-to-5.4 band for most of the following decade.

Looking back at 2025: Josh Allen Stands Apart

Among 2025 qualifiers with at least 100 zero-graded attempts, Josh Allen’s 6.59 yards per attempt and +0.173 EPA per attempt lead the league by a wide margin. In fact, he was the only qualifier north of +0.10 EPA per attempt, and on a bigger workload than most passers near him.

Daniel Jones (+0.052) and Jared Goff (+0.090) are the next-closest passers generating real value on their expected throws. Notably, Patrick Mahomes (-0.034) and Trevor Lawrence (-0.097) both fell below the league median on these expected plays, while Kirk Cousins (-0.247) and Joe Flacco (-0.273) posted the worst marks among regular starters.

Exactly the quarterbacks and offenses we'd expect rise to the top.

Jared Goff has long been one of the league's best examples of a quarterback operating efficiently within the structure of an offense, while Daniel Jones' first half of the season under Shane Steichen showed what can happen when a quarterback and scheme are in sync.

On the other end, Trevor Lawrence spent the first half of the season settling into Liam Coen's offense, while Patrick Mahomes was asked to create outside the structure of Kansas City's scheme far more often than in previous seasons.

And with Kirk Cousins and Joe Flacco both stepping into difficult situations with their teams' entrenched starters down, it isn't surprising to see them struggle to generate value on routine throws that an offense is designed to create.

---

All-time seasons: Who generated the most value from the unspectacular

Again, the results largely pass the eye test.

The coaches behind many of these seasons are as recognizable as the quarterbacks themselves. Kyle Shanahan appears twice through Jimmy Garoppolo's 2022 season in San Francisco and Matt Ryan's 2016 MVP campaign in Atlanta, while Ben Johnson's Detroit offense is represented by Jared Goff's 2024 season. Tom Brady's 2007 MVP season and Peyton Manning's record-setting 2013 season rank fifth and sixth, respectively, which is no surprise given that they led two of the most cohesive offenses ever to grace a football field.

While quarterback talent is still a prerequisite, the common thread running through the list is offensive efficiency and harmony. The quarterbacks who thrive on zero-graded throws are almost always the ones operating in systems that consistently create efficient, on-schedule football.

Interestingly, eight of the top 20 seasons have come since 2020, suggesting today's passing environment is producing more standout expected-throw seasons even as the league-wide average has drifted down.

Careers since 2006: Executioners and beneficiaries

Since 2006, 104 quarterbacks have attempted at least 500 passes that earned a play-level grade of zero. Jimmy Garoppolo leads that group at +0.111 EPA per attempt, while Nick Mullens — a two-year 49ers stopgap who clears the threshold at exactly 500 attempts — ranks second at +0.076, ahead of Patrick Mahomes (+0.054) and Jared Goff (+0.025). Brock Purdy slots in fifth at +0.023 across 931 attempts.

That gives the 49ers three of the top five career EPA-per-attempt marks on zero-graded throws since 2006.

Sort the same 500-attempt pool by yards per attempt instead of EPA, and you're left with another reminder that few coaches in the modern era have elevated quarterback play as consistently as Kyle Shanahan.

Garoppolo, Purdy, and Mullens don’t just rank near the top — they sweep the top three spots outright, at 6.43, 6.01 and 5.81 YPA, with Drake Maye’s small 2024–2025 sample the closest thing to a challenger at 5.80.

All three are 49ers quarterbacks who ran Kyle Shanahan’s offense, and none arrived in San Francisco with much pedigree: Garoppolo was a change-of-scenery trade, Mullens went undrafted and Purdy was the final pick of his draft class. Yet, on the throw meant to measure nothing more than executing the offense as designed, all three rank inside the top five career leaders in yards per attempt since 2006.

---

The Mahomes issue: The easy throws are no longer working

Patrick Mahomes' career stat line on these expected throws, +0.054 EPA per attempt across 3,483 attempts, is the best rate among the league's highest-volume passers. But lost in that is almost a tale of two careers.

From 2018 through 2022, Mahomes averaged +0.111 EPA per attempt on zero-graded throws across 2,197 attempts. That's essentially Jimmy Garoppolo's career-leading rate on nearly double the volume, and he finished above the league average in all five seasons. Three of those campaigns — 2018, 2020 and 2021 — rank among the top 20 individual seasons in the entire 2006-2025 sample.

On the throws a quarterback is simply supposed to execute, Mahomes wasn’t just executing; the Chiefs offense was turning “expected” into a clear and obvious advantage, year after year.

That gap has closed hard since 2023. Mahomes posted -0.094 EPA/attempt in 2023, his first outright negative mark, and he has stayed negative through 2024 (–0.011) and 2025 (–0.034).

He remains narrowly ahead of the league average across all three seasons — the league itself cratered on these throws, too — but the cushion has all but disappeared, from a +0.150 edge over league average across 2018–2022 to +0.047 since.

What it means

The zero-graded is arguably one of the least exciting play types in football, and two decades of data mostly bear that out: the league has never really turned “doing what’s asked” into a winning proposition, landing at a net loss in 19 of the last 20 seasons.

Set against that flat, faintly negative baseline, the passers and systems that consistently beat it are easy to spot — Garoppolo’s outlier rate, three 49ers quarterbacks sweeping the top of the career YPA list under Kyle Shanahan, and Josh Allen’s 2025 season standing alone at the top of an otherwise unremarkable league year.

Mahomes’s career shows what it looks like to lose that edge, and how early this data catches it.

Zero-graded throws don't tell us who the best quarterback is. They tell us which offenses consistently make football easier. And over 20 years of data, that's proven to be one of the clearest indicators of which quarterbacks and play-callers are truly operating in sync.