Process over results: I swear we didn’t put him up to this, but one of the first things that Ben mentioned when he came onto the show was that one of the key criticisms they get at PFF is that they don’t watch the tape, which he stated isn’t true at all - “that’s all we do,” he said, at least as it relates to how they formulate their grades.
Linsey said their goal with their grades is to really look at process over results. Which was music to mine and Joe’s ears. He went on to describe the PFF grading process, which was great to hear first hand about something that often feels like a black box.
While he acknowledged that it isn’t perfect (no one metric or methodology is), Ben walked us through the overarching goal with grades, is to assess whether a particular player
did their job on a given play or not. Based on how well or not so well they did their job, their assigned a grade, anywhere from -2 through +2, in half point increments.
This led to some interesting discussion as we talked through
how to reconcile what we were seeing on tape, and what PFF was seeing when they have graded Bolles as about an average-ish left tackle over the last year.
Here’s a nugget we stumbled on as we talked through it, and just goes to show the value of sitting down and talking football with people, I always learn something.
The primary distinction, or disconnect, that we discovered is while both of us are attempting to parse out the process vs just the result or measurable stat,
where we focused on the technique used and less on how Bolles actually did on the play, PFF leaned more towards ‘did he do his job’, regardless of how it looked or if he used proper technique.
Linsey said essentially, “even if it’s ugly” as long as the player did their job (protected the QB, walled off their block in the run game) that’s a positive in PFF’s grading system.
Which makes sense, especially for Bolles. He is athletic enough at times to recover when he’s initially beat due to bad technique, and still potentially get a piece of the blocker, leading to his job being done. However, his continuing to do that job with repeated poor technique is what leads to the inconsistency - sometimes it bites him and sometimes it doesn’t.
So, PFF isn’t necessarily dinging him for bad hand placement and opening up his hips too early, as long as he can chase his guy past the QB after he’s beat, and my analysis wasn’t setup to give him credit for still doing his job, even if it was ugly,
as I was looking at repeatability and specific improvements in technique.
Reply With Quote
#7 - JOHN - #44 - FLOYD - #80 - ROD
Originally Posted by Jaded
