Harry
ASFN Consultant and Senior Writer
Ever since Sabremetrics revolutionized baseball people have been trying to do the same things with football. PFF has been the most successful of those trying. Contrary to popular myth Chris Collinsworth did not invent the program. Oddly an Englishman, Neil Hornsby, produced this concept. Collinsworth is just merely the major investor. Beginning with the NFL, the service has since expanded to the NCAA and even the CFL. It’s believed that most of the NFL teams subscribe to the service. The recent draft results would tend to indicate the Cards are one of the subscribers.
It’s important to understand that this system is not like the hitting evaluations in the MLB. Those are based upon statistical probabilities. It’s more like the fielding measures that are subjective. In the PFF system each player’s effort is assigned plus/minus points. At the end of a game the points are totaled and that total is transformed by some proprietary formula into a 0-100 grade. The problem is each evaluator is making a subjective point assignment. Statistically the more you total the more subjective the variance among evaluators becomes. BTW they also now do quite a few custom jobs for various clients. However, not everyone likes the PFF system.
Here’s a Bill Belichick’s take on PFF, “
“You see a play on film and a receiver goes uncovered down the field. So you know it’s probably one of two guys’ mistakes, so you don’t know which guy it is,” Belichick said on “Ordway, Merloni and Fauria” on Monday during his weekly interview with WEEI. “A lot of times the announcer will say, ‘[This guy] should’ve taken him,’ or, ‘[That guy] should have taken him.’ And I’m looking at the play saying, it could have been either guy, depending on what the call was.”
Belichick admitted sometimes his players will correct him, because he will approach the player with a teaching point only to learn there’s another player at fault because of an adjustment at the line of scrimmage.
“In terms of analytics, you get a lot of, ‘This guy should have him. That guy should have him.’ I know from our team, there are times when we don’t know exactly what went wrong until we sort out the play,” Belichick said on WEEI. “So it’s impossible someone else could have known. Sometimes what it looks like is not what it is.”
The Boston Globe had other reservations,
https://bostonsportsmedia.com/2014/06/04/can-pro-football-focus-stats-be-blindly-trusted/
There are many more critical evaluations out there. I’ll let you troll the Net if you want them. Now you may think from this that I don’t like PFF. That would be wrong. I admire what they’re trying to do. I just don’t want to get carried away and think theirs evaluation is an absolute, accurate truth. It merely one view. So while I’m glad they like the AZ draft I’d rather have the scouts I admire like it. Fortunately most of them do.
It’s important to understand that this system is not like the hitting evaluations in the MLB. Those are based upon statistical probabilities. It’s more like the fielding measures that are subjective. In the PFF system each player’s effort is assigned plus/minus points. At the end of a game the points are totaled and that total is transformed by some proprietary formula into a 0-100 grade. The problem is each evaluator is making a subjective point assignment. Statistically the more you total the more subjective the variance among evaluators becomes. BTW they also now do quite a few custom jobs for various clients. However, not everyone likes the PFF system.
Here’s a Bill Belichick’s take on PFF, “
“You see a play on film and a receiver goes uncovered down the field. So you know it’s probably one of two guys’ mistakes, so you don’t know which guy it is,” Belichick said on “Ordway, Merloni and Fauria” on Monday during his weekly interview with WEEI. “A lot of times the announcer will say, ‘[This guy] should’ve taken him,’ or, ‘[That guy] should have taken him.’ And I’m looking at the play saying, it could have been either guy, depending on what the call was.”
Belichick admitted sometimes his players will correct him, because he will approach the player with a teaching point only to learn there’s another player at fault because of an adjustment at the line of scrimmage.
“In terms of analytics, you get a lot of, ‘This guy should have him. That guy should have him.’ I know from our team, there are times when we don’t know exactly what went wrong until we sort out the play,” Belichick said on WEEI. “So it’s impossible someone else could have known. Sometimes what it looks like is not what it is.”
The Boston Globe had other reservations,
https://bostonsportsmedia.com/2014/06/04/can-pro-football-focus-stats-be-blindly-trusted/
There are many more critical evaluations out there. I’ll let you troll the Net if you want them. Now you may think from this that I don’t like PFF. That would be wrong. I admire what they’re trying to do. I just don’t want to get carried away and think theirs evaluation is an absolute, accurate truth. It merely one view. So while I’m glad they like the AZ draft I’d rather have the scouts I admire like it. Fortunately most of them do.
