PHOENIX – An NFL player sees his Pro Football Focus grade after a game. He laughs to himself, and more with his teammates. His position coach already gave him a good grade in the film room at practice on Monday, but PFF says he struggled.
Fans argue online, taking sides between what the eyeball test revealed and what the analytics say. Media broadcasts and stories dissect the advanced statistics on their shows and in their stories, with some questioning the data and others treating it as gospel.
By Tuesday or Wednesday, points and player grades have become the central talking point around the player’s performance. Meanwhile, the players and coaches are already focusing on their next game on Sunday.
Founded in 2006, Pro Football Focus has evolved from a niche advanced database into one of the NFL’s most influential tools. To casual fans, PFF has become the unofficial report card for player performance, reacting to every play and game while fueling a social media debate.
Inside the practice facilities, the grades are treated differently, but nearly everyone interviewed for this story – from former coaches and scouts to players – described the same balancing act. The numbers can reveal trends, but they cannot replace the mentality inside the helmet or the intricacies of each play, which only players and coaches fully understand.
“Not in my opinion,” former Arizona Cardinals coach Bruce Arians said, when asked if PFF reflects what happens on the field. “When they say their numbers say this or their book says this, who wrote the book? It wasn’t a coach. It can help in some situations but it’s not like baseball.”
Coaches insist that players are measured by what happens inside NFL practice facilities every week, and on game days, but while coaches may dismiss PFF in news conferences, they quietly use it to assist in making important decisions. PFF grades matter – but often less than the film, the eye test and searchable or proprietary data.
For fans and media, however, PFF has become one of the NFL’s most influential tools – not because everyone loves the grading system, but because PFF’s data makes the multi-faceted puzzle of football easier to dissect and comprehend.
Advanced data in sports
As technology has advanced, sports have become more data driven. Baseball, basketball and hockey were innovators with advanced analytics, but during the 2020s, casual football fans saw a surge in broadcasts’ use of PFF.
For players and coaches, it has been a hard pivot in trying to accept this data while balancing it against the eye test.
“Football’s a little different because it’s a tough and physical game,” said Sam Wiglusz, a wide receiver who played for the Los Angeles Rams and currently plays in the United Football League. “I do think for positions like quarterback, and even receivers, there are numbers that you can’t really dispute if they’re there. But then there’s always the eye test part that kind of will never go away.
“With baseball, I think it’s a little bit more black and white because if you’re productive, you’re productive. You think about Moneyball — if you want to go off of guys getting on base, you can’t really dispute that number.”
Former Arizona State coach Herman Edwards coached in the NFL in various roles with the Chiefs, Buccaneers and Jets from 1990 to 2008, coinciding with the beginning of the data craze and the advent of PFF. Back then, evaluation for coaches meant measurables and most importantly, instinct. As his NFL coaching career wound down, he watched analytics slowly creep into football culture.
“The tape tells you who the guy is,” Edwards said. “That’s his resume, his tape, because that’s the work he puts on display in the arena and you can never get past that.”
Edwards never trusted the shift to analytics and is still skeptical about the numbers game.
“Numbers were involved, but I don’t think they were involved the way they are now,” he said. “I don’t know if that’s always good, to be quite honest. The numbers are a robot. The robot ain’t playing, it’s just collecting data. Well, that’s great, but at the end of the day, I can block that guy. The robot — he ain’t blocking nobody.”
PFF’s history and methodology
Matthew Coller, a writer who covers the Vikings at Purple Insider and is also a member of the Pro Football Writers of America, wrote a book on PFF, said most fans have no clue about PFF’s origin.
“People don’t realize where PFF came from — that it was a random British guy who just wanted to understand football a lot better,” Coller said.
That random guy was a football diehard named Neil Hornsby, a football enthusiast from Great Britain. Hornsby began charting NFL games by hand before any team thought to do the same.
Sam Monson, one of PFF’s earliest analysts, remembers when the entire grading operation ran on instinct and spontaneous improvisation. He recalls constant phone calls with former lead analyst of PFF Ben Stockwell.
“My training was on the job,” Monson said. “I spent basically that entire first year on a constant Skype call with Ben Stockwell – ‘OK, Ben, this doesn’t fit any of the things you told me. How does this get graded?’
“A lot of it was talking through how specific, weird situations that you hadn’t thought about would fit into the overall category.”
Monson explained the premise of PFF’s grading scale.
“The basic premise is you get a 0 if you did your job, if it was as expected, and then anything above and beyond expectation gets a positive grade. Anything below expectation gets a negative grade – in 0.5 increments to give you the gradation of how much above or below expectation that play was,” he said.
From Hornsby, PFF built something that the NFL had not seen before: a scale that graded every player on every play. The process behind the grades is more rigorous than most critics and fans know or acknowledge.
“You cannot conceptualize how many hours have gone into sharpening this system to the best possible thing that it could be,” Monson said.
The crux of the current-day PFF analytics involves the methodology on how linemen get graded.
“The grading system was founded on the principle of grading ‘production’ rather than traits or measurables, but perhaps a better way to describe it is a player’s ‘contribution to production’ on a given play,” PFF’s website states.
The offensive line grading system was built with the help of Paul Alexander, longtime Cincinnati Bengals offensive line coach. Still, some lineman question one of the most debated aspects of PFF’s system: How are lineman properly graded?
Lyle Sendlein, who played center for the Arizona Cardinals from 2007 to 2015, said the complexity of the offensive line makes a data-driven grading scale difficult to pinpoint.
“Your guard might kick out to go help your tackle and leave your center,” Sendlein said. “And then your center thought he was going to have help. And then the role of the guard was to post before you leave. If the guard doesn’t leave, how does PFF know that?
“It might have been the guard that had a portion of that fault, or was it purely on the center? Or was there a chip from the tight end that was supposed to be there? Did the quarterback call the wrong play in the huddle?”
Coller pushed back on the idea that lineman are the toughest to grade.
“I think the offensive and defensive line are actually the easiest things for PFF to grade,” Coller said. “What was the left tackle’s assignment on 90% of pass dropbacks? It’s to stop the other guy from getting to the quarterback. If he does it, he’s succeeded. If he doesn’t, he hasn’t. There’s not a whole lot that’s complicated there.”
Coller said that Alexander compared a full season of his own grades to PFF’s and that the two matched up more than 90 percent of the time.
Sendlein acknowledged that the system has its merits, but he still questioned PFF’s ability to grade when it doesn’t know individual assignments and it doesn’t take into account myriad variables on every play.
He also believes the public misunderstands what a grade for an offensive lineman actually measures.
“Offensive line is a unit score,” he said. “If your left tackle wins 49 of 50 pass protections, your left guard wins 49 of 50, your center 49, right guard 49, right tackle 49 — that’s five sacks you gave up. That’s a horrible game.
And there is more nuance.
“It’s harder to win a rep at left tackle against Myles Garrett than it is at center,” Sendlein said. “But the result is going to be the same according to PFF.”
Bill Rees spent 16 years in the scouting department for multiple NFL teams before transitioning to the college football scouting realm more than a decade ago, before transitioning to roles at Northwestern, Wake Forest, Notre Dame and Texas. Rees agreed with Sendlein, noting that data can vary greatly, based on the caliber of the opponent.
“With offensive linemen, who are they matched up against?” Rees said. “If an offensive tackle at USC is blocking a defensive end from Central Michigan, his grade that week is gonna be pretty good. But here he is going against the defensive end from Oregon and the grade wasn’t great — so he’s somewhere in between.”
The media
NBC’s Sunday Night Football showcases Pro Football Focus during the introduction of starting lineups by including a single grade next to each player’s name on a scale from 0 to 100.
Tensions over this scale came to light when former NFL defensive end J.J. Watt publicly called on NBC to stop providing PFF grades during broadcasts. Watt argued that no grading system truly captures what happens on a football field without knowing what a player’s assignment is on each play.
“I know the defensive line play unbelievably well,” Watt told The Pat McAfee Show. “I could not go and grade a game for a player and give him a definitive grade without speaking to him, his coach, (learning) the scheme, everything. PFF has a ton of great stuff; player grading sucks. Stop putting it out.”
Cris Collinsworth calls Sunday Night Football games, was the majority owner and chairman of PFF from 2014 until 2026 and remains an owner of the consumer operation. He defended the system and invited people to visit PFF headquarters to see the process firsthand.
“Anybody who wants to come in and take a look, debate, argue, sit down, pound the table. We’ve had a lot of people do it in the past, and we’ll have a lot of people do it in the future,” Collinsworth told The Athletic.
The exchange also put a spotlight on a potential conflict of interest. Collinsworth is a voice to millions every Sunday night, explaining what the grades mean while also profiting from them.
Monson said the broadcast presentation was always a point of interest internally.
“For the first few weeks of the season, you can’t necessarily just use a guy’s grade for that season,” Monson said.
Coller said that the way PFF grades are displayed on broadcasts has caused more confusion than clarity.
“They should probably just use key PFF stats rather than just this guy ranks 64th out of 64 and it’s like, ‘Well, we’re in Week 2,’” he said. “He’s only played one game, it was a bad game, and now he’s the worst.”
Sample size remains a notable issue when it comes to grading. Monson said early-season graders required a workaround internally at PFF precisely because the first few weeks of grades can produce wildly skewed numbers.
“If a guy went up against Myles Garrett in week one and he’s sitting there with a 30 grade – it could be Trent Williams – and you’re saying Trent Williams is ranked like the worst player in the NFL at his position,” Monson said. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
The deeper problem is that broadcasts rarely explain what the numbers mean, and that goes for all sports.
“They don’t say, ‘Hey, this is how they’ve performed this year,’” Coller said. “A lot of people will think it’s just a player ranking when really it’s not – it’s a reflection of how they’ve performed to that date.”
Sendlein said public perception of players can be skewed by the broadcast’s lack of explanation of Pro Football Focus grades to fans.
“There’s times where we’re clicking on all cylinders and playing well and people are talking high of you, and you’re in the film room and your coach doesn’t think that high of you,” he said. “There’s times where the public perception is, ‘God, these guys suck, they can’t protect anybody,’ and your O-line coach is defending your plays.”
Players and coaches react
Coaches and players offered a mixed bag of opinions when it comes to data and the grading scale. Wiglusz, who has been in both the NFL and UFL, said analytics and grades have their limits.
“There could be a game where you’ve got no targets, but you’ve graded out 95% because you’re making your presence,” Wiglusz said. “Within the building, it’s kind of just another number because they’re being graded by their position coach anyway – and that’s the guy making the decision on whether or not you extend your contract.”
For Wiglusz, it was not a topic of conversation between his teammates.
“I’ve had people be like, ‘I can’t believe I got this, even though I had a good game,’” he said. “But I wouldn’t say it’s like you’re going to judge someone based on their score. It doesn’t come up that often.”
Sendlein said that his focus was not PFF, but the tasks his coaches gave him.
“It matters what your position coach thinks and how they graded you, because they truly know what your role and responsibilities were and what is asked of you,” he said. “That’s the opinion I cared about.”
Edwards still believes in the traditional style of evaluating players with the eye test and gut feeling. Still, Edwards said coexistence between old school and new school can be useful.
“I think they can coexist as long as you understand at the end of the day the players play,” he said. “Players aren’t robots, they’re human. Good coaches know – listen to your eyes, man. Look at the game. Just watch the game and the game will tell you what we need to do.”
Scouting uses
What fans see on Sunday Night Football broadcasts and NFL Live is completely different from what happens inside the practice facilities. The grades that PFF data show are the public face. Inside the building, they are only used as a tool.
Rees spent nearly 50 years in football personnel roles from college scouting through a stint with the Kansas City Chiefs to the Chicago Bears. He has seen scouting analytics seep into the league, now dominating it.
“Now in every NFL team, there is almost as big a division of analytic people as there are scouts,” Rees said. “And you’re not even touching on AI.”
Coller said that the transformation is much deeper than people realize. It’s not just about evaluating opponents, it’s about evaluating their own players, and every team has its own analytical tools that differ in many respects from PFF’s.
“A GM told me that they use the (PFF) grades to cross-check all of their internal grades, and if they don’t match up, they go back and watch and ask questions and have meetings,” Coller said. “They are very aware of what PFF grades are.”
Rees said at some point, every team has over or undervalued a player because of the numbers. He believes the consequences can be disastrous for an organization’s future if it perpetuates this pattern.
“I know some teams, with tight ends, if they don’t grade out on blocking and the separation percentage wasn’t what they wanted or yards per reception wasn’t what they wanted, they say, ‘Uh-uh, we’re not going on them,’” Rees said. “And all of a sudden the guy’s one of the two or three best tight ends in the league. I know that’s happened.”
Rees’ advice for young scouts is to try and navigate the crossroads between interpreting the data and going with their gut.
“If you have a discrepancy in your scouting department – you’ve got a player ranked highly and the analytic numbers are significantly different – you need to dig more into the player and find out why there is a discrepancy,” he said. “It can give you a better chance of being correct.”
The future of PFF
Rees believes that good data will never replace judgment coaching, the front office or scouts. It just sharpens their ability to do what is best for Sunday afternoons, and recognizes what makes a good football player.
“What makes the kid tick?” Rees asked. “How much does he love football? How physically tough is he? How mentally tough is he? The analytics can’t tell you that. It can tell you how he’s performed when he’s been on the field, but they can’t really tell you how he’s done it.”
Sendlein said that there is an infinite number of variables on each and every play.
“There’s so much alignment and scheme and other variables that I would think would be hard for someone outside of the room to analyze and put a positive or negative score on,” he said.
Even so, Coller said that PFF and NFL analytics will always be around.
“The analytics are one million percent here to stay,” he said. “PFF has completely changed the way – whether a lot of media people will admit to it or not – that we all analyze sports.”
But when the final whistle blows, Edwards stressed that the final score is what matters the most. One team is the winner and the other is the loser.
“I don’t care how you gather the information – you got to make them believe, ‘If we do these things, we can win,’” he said. “Because that’s all the players care about. They just want to win. What’s the score at the end of that game? All the other stuff doesn’t matter. It’s the score.
“Somebody’s going to win, somebody’s going to lose.”
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