94.1 is a perfectly respectable passer rating, a shade above the 2025 league average. Jacoby Brissett posted it in his first year in Arizona (Pro Football Reference). By ESPN’s Total QBR, which weighs how much a quarterback’s play actually helped his team win, the same season comes out at 41.2, where 50 is average (ESPN).
Same quarterback, same year. One number calls it a decent season, the other calls it a poor one. That gap is the entire reason advanced stats exist.
This is a tour of the ones you’ll meet most, written for someone who has never charted a down. I am not going to make you do any maths. Each one is just a plain question the basic box score can’t answer.
What they’re really for
The basic box score can tell you a comfortable lie. Passing yards reward whoever threw the most, and the quarterback throwing the most is often the one losing, because you cannot run down the clock when you are behind.
Advanced stats are the attempt to stop the box score flattering a bad afternoon. They don’t replace the numbers you already know. They add the context those numbers leave out.
So you don’t need to work a single one of them out yourself. You need to know which question each answers, and it is usually a question you have already asked out loud while watching. Start with the plainest ones on the NFL Stats hub and the rest follow.
EPA: the one underneath all the others
Nearly everything here is built on one idea, expected points. Every spot on the field, given the down and the distance, is worth an average number of points to the team with the ball. Expected points added, or EPA, measures how much a single play moved that number.
That is why it beats raw yardage. Four yards on third-and-three is a first down and the drive lives. Four yards on third-and-eight is a punt. Same gain, opposite value, and EPA is the stat that tells them apart (NFL QB Stats Decoded).
If you came to this from football, the game most of the world means by the word, EPA is the NFL’s version of expected goals (xG): a running tally of what each moment was really worth, rather than what the scoreboard happened to show. It is the number I reached for in the Week 2 review to show how completely one defence switched off the league’s hottest offence. Learn EPA and you are most of the way there.
Efficiency: did this actually help?
Success rate is EPA asked a simpler way. It is the share of a team’s plays that left it better off than before, which in the modern version means the share with positive EPA (Sam Hoppen’s weekly breakdowns). A team that grinds out four yards a snap posts a high success rate; a boom-or-bust team can have good EPA from a few big plays and a thin success rate underneath it.
CPOE, completion percentage over expected, does the same job for a quarterback’s accuracy. It sets what he completed against how hard his throws actually were, so he is not rewarded for dinking it short all day (NFL QB Stats Decoded).
Efficiency stats ask whether the offense stayed on schedule, not how many yards it piled up.
Explosive rate: how often they broke it open
Explosive plays are the big gains, and a handful of them swing a game more than a long run of short ones. Explosive rate just counts them: the share of passes gaining 20 or more yards, or runs gaining 10 or more (Sam Hoppen on where that line should sit).
It is the natural partner to success rate. Consistency keeps a drive alive; explosiveness is what finishes it in two snaps instead of twelve. The best offenses manage both, and most teams are clearly better at one.
A game can turn on three plays, so it is worth counting them on their own.
Pressure: the sack total’s bigger brother
A sack is the visible moment the quarterback gets dragged down. Pressure counts everything leading up to it: the share of his dropbacks where a rusher got home, hit him or shoved him off his spot, sack or not (NFL Defense Stats Decoded).
It matters because sacks are lumpy and a little lucky, while pressure happens far more often and tells you more. A pass rusher can wreck a game and finish with no sacks at all, and pressure is where that work shows up.
Think of it as the honest version of the pass rush, the way passes defensed is the honest version of interceptions.
Tendencies: what a team likes, not how good it is
The last cluster describes style rather than quality. These are the answers to “why did they line up like that”.
PROE, pass rate over expected, is whether a team passed more or less than the situation called for, which is a tidy read on how aggressive a play-caller is (The Offense, decoded). Personnel tells you who is on the field, three-receiver sets against heavier looks with extra tight ends. Motion is a player moving before the snap. On defense you will see man or zone coverage, light or heavy boxes, which is how many defenders crowd the line, and blitz rate, how often they send extra rushers (The Defense, decoded).
None of these says a team is good. They say what it tends to do, which is exactly what you want when you are guessing the next play.
Why two sites give different numbers
One catch to know before you start comparing. Most of these are not official league stats. The NFL logs yards and touchdowns; EPA, pressure, coverage and the rest are built by analysts from the play-by-play, so the exact figure depends on who built it (NFL Data Sources).
That is why a pressure rate on one site won’t match another’s, and why it pays to pick one source and learn its conventions. I lean on people like Sam Hoppen, whose weekly breakdowns put these to work, and I credit every source I use on the data page.
A small gap between two sites is usually the charting, not a mistake.
Where to start
You don’t have to learn these in a week, or at all. Pick the one that answers a question you already have. If you keep wondering why a team that moved the ball still lost, start with EPA and success rate. If you want to know why a defender gets praised without the sack numbers to show for it, go to pressure.
The NFL Stats hub is the front door to all of them, in the same plain English. Read one, watch for it on Sunday, and come back for the next when you want it.