NFL Completion Percentage Over Expectation (CPOE) Explained

If you already know a thing or two about football, you’ve likely heard people mention acronyms such as DVOA, EPA and CPOE. These jumbled letters can sound confusing at first, but they can also significantly enhance your NFL betting.

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Today, we want to teach you about CPOE, also known as completion percentage over expectation. If you’re looking for an advanced metric to take your NFL betting to the next level, be sure to read on.

What is CPOE?

Completion percentage over expectation aims to calculate the strength of a quarterback’s completion percentage while considering the difficulty of the throws they attempt.

Since not all completions (and completion percentages) are created equal, simply comparing raw completion stats is not enough. Meanwhile, CPOE adjusts for contextual factors that could make a pass more or less likely to be completed.

Thanks to CPOE, we can gain a better understanding of a quarterback’s accuracy and performance.

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How to Use CPOE When Betting

As we already mentioned, raw completion percentage will only get your so far. If you want to aid your NFL betting process, it makes sense to get help from CPOE.

Instead of judging quarterbacks on completion percentage, you can use CPOE to identify which players add value to their team. This will open up doors to various football betting markets, including passing yards, interceptions and props.

On top of that, you can combine CPOE with other advanced metrics to get an even greater overview of a player, strengthening your chances of making winning bets.

How is CPOE Calculated?

Completion percentage over expectation is calculated by using many different factors. Here are the main factors that contribute towards calculating CPOE.

Field position

Down

Yards to go

Air yards

Distance to sticks

Home-field advantage

Indoors/outdoors

Era

Pass location

Essentially, CPOE = actual completion percentage – expected completion percentage. Don’t worry, there are plenty of useful websites out there that can help you with these advanced metrics.

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Cons of Using CPOE

A key factor to remember is that CPOE relies on a private formula and unique player tracking data. As a result, it is impossible to create an exact replica of the model.

Although versions of the formula have been created using readily-available stats, they only use depth of target and general direction, meaning they do not provide a precise output when it comes to calculating CPOE.

Ultimately, we recommend sticking to the tried and tested CPOE model from Next Gen Stats. This is the only formula that will give you accurate enough readings to enhance your NFL betting.

Read our ultimate guide to betting on the NFL Super Bowl next.