Pro Footballl Focus top 10 QB

aw.. somebody wants attention. how cute.
https://www.profootballfocus.com/blog/2015/08/27/ranking-the-nfls-top-10-qbs/

6. Tom Brady, Patriots (83.7)

Brady was our highest-graded quarterback in the NFL from Weeks 5 to 13 last season, recovering from a shaky start (which included a really poor performance against the Kansas City Chiefs in Week 4) to have another stellar season. One cause for concern would be how we performed from Week 13 through the Super Bowl, but despite being very average for that stretch, he is still one of the best quarterbacks in the league.

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Those football illiterate morons gave Brady a negative grade for his superbowl performance.

patsinthesnow said:

Those football illiterate morons gave Brady a negative grade for his superbowl performance.

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i think have friends who subscribes PFF. that's like flushing money down the toilet.

i don't even like andrew luck, but he isn't even top 10? tannehill over luck? what in the world?

Ya he was really average in the playoffs

He was "very average" in the playoffs? He dropped 35 on the Ravens with no running game and 28 on the Seahawks with no running game. I get it, he threw some bad interceptions, but he was great. I actually checked to make sure this was for the correct season when I read it.

Hard to break it down within in a year cause do you base it solely off that year? Do you add in past proformance. Do you count post season or just regular season? Too many options. I just do it like this.

My top 10 right now

#1 Rodgers/Brady
#2 Brady/Rodgers
#3 Big Ben (hate him but he took big steps the past 2 years as a pocket passer.. not just having Brown)
#4 Brees
#5 Luck
#6 Romo
#7 Rivers
#8 P. Manning (he is going to have a strong early year then fall off again... Sad to see it happen but it happens to every player. He is not in my top 5 anymore).
#9 Wilson
#10 Flacco (say what you will.. gets it down in the post season pretty well)

3 HMs

#11 E. Manning (past success puts him here. Needs to have another good season though)
#12 Tannehill (i know right )
#13 Ryan

wolverinejoe80 said:

i think have friends who subscribes PFF. that's like flushing money down the toilet.

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Paying Gary Tanguay as a motivational speaker is money better spent.

My god....

Brady DID have a bad interception in the superbowl, but the second one was much more a great play by the LB than a bad throw by Brady. Clearly when these guys developed their metrics, they gave too much value to interceptions. But in the end who cares.

Why are we insulted by a site who subjectively rates QB's differently than we do. Given how all individual stats are skewed by the fact so much individual success is based on the work of so many others. It's the nature of the game. Even using mathematical methods, it is impossible to try to gauge individual success in a game so rooted in teamwork.

PFF is a function of fan demand to attempt to do just that. Why be angry at someone's attempt to do the impossible, just because it disagrees with our own very subjective opinions. Brady can be rated 20th as fare as I'm concerned, as long as I can still enjoy another double digit win season.


Just sayin'

patsinthesnow said:

Those football illiterate morons gave Brady a negative grade for his superbowl performance.

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Yup, that is all you need to know. To say that he was average in the SB is just stupid.

patfanken said:

Brady DID have a bad interception in the superbowl, but the second one was much more a great play by the LB than a bad throw by Brady. Clearly when these guys developed their metrics, they gave too much value to interceptions. But in the end who cares.

Why are we insulted by a site who subjectively rates QB's differently than we do. Given how all individual stats are skewed by the fact so much individual success is based on the work of so many others. It's the nature of the game. Even using mathematical methods, it is impossible to try to gauge individual success in a game so rooted in teamwork.

PFF is a function of fan demand to attempt to do just that. Why be angry at someone's attempt to do the impossible, just because it disagrees with our own very subjective opinions. Brady can be rated 20th as fare as I'm concerned, as long as I can still enjoy another double digit win season.


Just sayin'

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There's a very good reason why this kind of analysis works well in baseball and not so well in football. Baseball is a sport of individual one on one matchups disguised as a team sport. Pitcher vs hitter, hitter vs pitcher, pitcher vs baserunner, baserunner vs infielder and so on. Stats and numbers come from the achievements of the individual. You can miss a game and look at a boxscore instead and get a pretty good sense of how any individual played.

It doesn't work very well in a pure team oriented sport like football.

sb1 said:

There's a very good reason why this kind of analysis works well in baseball and not so well in football. It's a sport of individual one on one matchups disguised as a team sport. Pitcher vs hitter, hitter vs pitcher, pitcher vs baserunner, baserunner vs infielder and so on. Stats and numbers come from the achievements of the individual. You can watch a boxscore and get a pretty good sense of the

It doesn't work very well in a pure team oriented sport like football.

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Well said.

One big example is PFF has brainwashed people into thinking Chris Harris Jr. is in Revis/Sherman's league. He plays RCB, not LCB, so he's the #2 CB on his own team. While he's covering an injured Wayne or Moncrief, Talib is busy getting torched by Hilton in the AFCCG. If he was actually a top 5 CB, he'd be playing LCB, the strong side for a QB.

PFF: Analysts hate them! PFF comes to these six conclusions that you might be a 90's kid using one weird trick (number four will blow your mind). It's all clickbait. They are the buzzfeed of sports.

sb1 said:

There's a very good reason why this kind of analysis works in baseball. It's a sport of individual one on one matchups disguised as a team sport. Pitcher vs hitter, hitter vs pitcher, pitcher vs baserunner, baserunner vs infielder and so on. Stats and numbers come from the achievements of the individual.

It doesn't work very well in a pure team oriented sport like football.

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There is also a ton of variability in assignments, and a service like Pro Football focus tries to treat every snap as equivalent. For example a year ago both Talib and Alterraun Verner were free agents. Statistically based off of PFF Verner blew Talib away, was 3 years younger, and had no history of personal or injury problems. He was close to the top of their list of free agents, but he ended up with a contract 1/2 the size of Talib's. Why? Talib followed #1's around all season, and played far more man to man in a cover 1 shell, while Verner stuck to the right side of the field, played against a weaker crop of opponents, and ran mostly zone or bump and trail technique with safety help over the top.

Sure he had more visible errors, but he clearly had the more valuable skillset, and more proven history of a #1 type role that the market demanded.

For QB's in particular their grading methodology just doesn't work. They operate under the assumption that most plays should have a 0 grade. The thing is that they don't spend enough time truly understanding the play and the decisions that are being made. If a corner is playing off coverage on third and 3, and the QB notices and audibles his play to a quick slant off of a motion, that's a job well done and a positive on the game. Sure it's not as impressive as throwing a deep 15 yard out under duress, but just because something looks easy or difficult doesn't mean it's necessarily good, bad, or average. They don't really have the capacity to really consider plays like that with their turnaround times which is why I really think their grading methodology only works at a of positions.

PFF is fine- not perfect with reporting the numerics

For the analytics and analysis....different story. It's unaware and lacks context and doesn't account for perspective.

I will never understand why some people insist on citing PFF as a source, it is pure garbage.

patfanken said:

Why are we insulted by a site who subjectively rates QB's differently than we do. Given how all individual stats are skewed by the fact so much individual success is based on the work of so many others. It's the nature of the game. Even using mathematical methods, it is impossible to try to gauge individual success in a game so rooted in teamwork.

PFF is a function of fan demand to attempt to do just that. Why be angry at someone's attempt to do the impossible, just because it disagrees with our own very subjective opinions. Brady can be rated 20th as fare as I'm concerned, as long as I can still enjoy another double digit win season.

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It's not even mathematics, it's just assigning arbitrary plus or minus values to play. This is fine for the reason you're saying, and the PFF game charters do watch the games closely, but using numbers also has two unfortunate side effects:

• It invokes the mysticism of mathematics. It leads people to believe what they're seeing is the result of a quantitative model, rather than a qualitative analysis. Models, of course, involve subjective decisions about the premises - what goes into them and how they're weighted and so on. But once you make the model, you accept the outputs. Essentially, to critique the biases of a mathematical model, you critique the inputs. To critique biases in qualitative analysis, you critique the outputs. This is qualitative analysis but is dressed up to look like math. It's essentially piggybacking on the analytics "revolution" - though of course we should always be wary of unscientific "metrics" which are not transparent about their premises and inputs (see: QBR).

• In striving to evoke mathematical mysticism, it flattens otherwise useful qualitative analysis that is better done with tape review. A game charter may award a +1 to a cornerback for a deflection, good positioning, diagnosing a screen pass, coming up to make a tackle on a run play, and so on. But the reader gets nothing out of it other than an arbitrary mathematical grade, so you have no idea what actually constituted the grade. Drew Brees and Tom Brady might both get a +5 or something in the same week with wildly different stat lines, play selection, and so on. Why not just describe why their play was so good rather than giving them some dumb grade?

The problem with PFF is not so much that it's useless, but that in striving to sell itself as analytics for marketing purposes, it defaces all of the advantages of the type of analysis it is: amateur scouting by people with the time and willingness to watch hours of football. I'm cool with the latter, but honestly I'd much rather get actual analysis than charts of fake, arbitrary numbers.

BobDigital said:

Hard to break it down within in a year cause do you base it solely off that year? Do you add in past proformance. Do you count post season or just regular season? Too many options. I just do it like this.

My top 10 right now

#1 Rodgers/Brady
#2 Brady/Rodgers
#3 Big Ben (hate him but he took big steps the past 2 years as a pocket passer.. not just having Brown)
#4 Brees
#5 Luck
#6 Romo
#7 Rivers
#8 P. Manning (he is going to have a strong early year then fall off again... Sad to see it happen but it happens to every player. He is not in my top 5 anymore).
#9 Wilson
#10 Flacco (say what you will.. gets it down in the post season pretty well)

3 HMs

#11 E. Manning (past success puts him here. Needs to have another good season though)
#12 Tannehill (i know right )
#13 Ryan

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Matt Ryan is better than Tannehill IMO

PFF arenot football people. Their rankings are based on watching the TV feed (this may have changed, not sure) and grading players based upon their own made up and drastically flawed system. For example, they grade a QB higher for throwing into coverage than for finding the open reciever, give the bad choice bonus points for being a tough throw and downgrading the good choice as an easy throw.

primetime said:

It's not even mathematics, it's just assigning arbitrary plus or minus values to play. This is fine for the reason you're saying, and the PFF game charters do watch the games closely, but using numbers also has two unfortunate side effects:

• It invokes the mysticism of mathematics. It leads people to believe what they're seeing is the result of a quantitative model, rather than a qualitative analysis. Models, of course, involve subjective decisions about the premises - what goes into them and how they're weighted and so on. But once you make the model, you accept the outputs. Essentially, to critique the biases of a mathematical model, you critique the inputs. To critique biases in qualitative analysis, you critique the outputs. This is qualitative analysis but is dressed up to look like math. It's essentially piggybacking on the analytics "revolution" - though of course we should always be wary of unscientific "metrics" which are not transparent about their premises and inputs (see: QBR).

• In striving to evoke mathematical mysticism, it flattens otherwise useful qualitative analysis that is better done with tape review. A game charter may award a +1 to a cornerback for a deflection, good positioning, diagnosing a screen pass, coming up to make a tackle on a run play, and so on. But the reader gets nothing out of it other than an arbitrary mathematical grade, so you have no idea what actually constituted the grade. Drew Brees and Tom Brady might both get a +5 or something in the same week with wildly different stat lines, play selection, and so on. Why not just describe why their play was so good rather than giving them some dumb grade?

The problem with PFF is not so much that it's useless, but that in striving to sell itself as analytics for marketing purposes, it defaces all of the advantages of the type of analysis it is: amateur scouting by people with the time and willingness to watch hours of football. I'm cool with the latter, but honestly I'd much rather get actual analysis than charts of fake, arbitrary numbers.

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It appears, PT, that,you've taken way too many statistics classes , but that doesn't make what you say any less correct. Clearly the model PFF uses is flawed by its very nature of starting with a subjective view of someone watching a play without the benefit of knowing the play call on both sides of the ball and exactly what each individual's responsibilities are for that play. This is especially difficult in an era when so much of what the OL QB and WR's do depend on post snap reads.

BUT....that being said, it's what the fans want. It's never going to be better than a flawed system. The thing is, except for getting the position coach's grades, it is the best we've got. PFF, and FO's etc all provide a useful service as long as you take their work with a grain of salt and appreciate what their number DO give us. That is an INDICATION of a player's value and importance.....and that's ALL.

Right now, according to PFF, Tom Brady is one of the best QB's in the league. Whether they are rating him 1st or 10th, that's not going to change. Well the fact is I don't need to pay money to a statistical service to figure THAT out.