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NFLBy Adam Patrick on

Back in 2007, a young English gentleman by the name of Neil Hornsby created a website that dove deep into the crevices of the basic football statistics that everyone’s parents and grandparents grew up with. Hornsby’s site is now known to many within the football community as Pro Football Focus and has been consistently increasing its popularity ever since it was created a decade ago.

Fast forward to today and the majority owner of Pro Football Focus is former NFL wide receiver Cris Collinsworth, more than half of the teams in the league pay the website a good chunk of change for their in-depth statistics, and the company employs over 70 football-obsessed people.

Despite their increased success in the past few years, however, not everyone is exactly a fan of the work that the site does. Especially when it comes to their player grades.

Most recently, Minnesota Vikings head coach Mike Zimmer talked at the NFL owners meetings about his views on the validity of the site’s player grades.

Zimmer is also not even close to being the only NFL coach or player who has criticized how much these grades are thought of by some as the holy grail for player evaluation.

Back in 2013, Zimmer’s old buddy, Cincinnati Bengals head coach Marvin Lewis, called Pro Football Focus “some dumbass website that doesn’t have any idea of what football is.” Buffalo Bills running back LeSean McCoy was also not too pleased with the site back in February when it did not include him in their list of the Top 101 players of 2016.

Then there have been times when Pro Football Focus has actually disagreed with Pro Football Focus.

Now if this was just another small football blog ran by some guy living in his parent’s basement (not that there is anything wrong with that), then players and coaches around the NFL probably would not feel obligated to answer the questions their local media opts to ask them each week in relation to a player’s grade on the site.

However, that is not the case. Pro Football Focus has evolved into some sort of football bible that is worshiped by a good portion of the sport’s media. Many of them use the site’s grades to form their own opinion on a certain player or matchup. Their player rankings were even featured during NBC’s Sunday Night Football broadcasts last season.

But in reality, the player grades on Pro Football Focus should really be taken in a similar vein as all of the ludicrous grades divvied out by various online publications to every team after they finish selecting players in the NFL Draft.

Does anyone think the Dallas Cowboys really cared about ESPN grading them with a “C” for the additions to their roster during the 2016 offseason when the team was being led to the best record in the NFC by a rookie quarterback and a rookie running back?

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Let’s save some time and just go with the easy answer of nope.

Maybe if the grading system that Pro Football Focus uses actually made any logical type of sense, the site’s work would be better embraced by NFL coaches and players. Currently, this is how the website tries to explain its grading methodology.

“Our grading system is concerned with how a player performed on a particular play, not the outcome of that play.”

The site goes on to give an example of how a quarterback should not be given a negative grade for an incompletion on his stat sheet that was the result of one of his receivers dropping a pass. However, what if the receiver ran the correct route and the quarterback actually threw the ball in the wrong spot?

There is virtually no possible way the people analyzing game film for Pro Football Focus would be able to know this unless they were told directly by a player or coach. Yet they still attempt to evaluate a player’s performance based on their own preferences and subjectivity.

Pro Football Focus grading NFL players with game film being their only resource is like Guy Fieri disliking a cheeseburger without even tasting it and because it looks like a walrus wearing a tutu.

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There is just so much more that goes into what a player does on the field than simply making a play or not making a play. Even the best minds in the game like Bill Belichick know that.

“I think we need a little closer analysis a lot of times. Sometimes the play calls or what was called on the line of scrimmage might be something that we’re not aware of. That could happen in any game.

You think a player did something that he shouldn’t have done but maybe he got a call, a line call or a call from a linebacker or he thought the quarterback said something so he did what he thought was the right thing or maybe it was the right thing but that call shouldn’t have been made or should have been on the other side.”

The purpose of this is not to downplay the amount of work that the Pro Football Focus employees (and interns) do on a daily basis. There is a reason why more than half of the NFL’s teams pay the website for access to their data.

But to treat the site like it is some sort of player evaluation demigod when its staff does not even have all of the proper resources at their fingertips is something needs to stop. However, with a prominent NBC broadcaster in Collinsworth now leading the charge, do not expect Pro Football Focus’ player grades to be placed anywhere close to the back burner in the foreseeable future.

4 thoughts on “Dear Pro Football Focus, do everyone a favor and just stick to stats”

  2. Aren’t their grades based on broadcast film, and not All-22 film? So not only do they not know the play calls, they can’t even see the entire field of play to know what potential assignments are happening.

  3. This is a decent rough draft, but you might want to try a little harder. You wrote about them without talking to anyone at the website or providing any concrete research. This article is the journalistic equivalent of talking behind someone’s back.

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