Nelson wins NFL offensive rookie of month

[Chaka]

Originally Posted by Dam8610

They believe that the subjective opinion of the grader is educated, but that system so easily lends itself to infiltration by various biases as to render it practically useless.

Agreed - any grading system that isn't completely transparent needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Here's the description that PFF gives of how it's grades are reached, in case anyone was curious:

https://www.profootballfocus.com/pff-player-grades

Basically, their team of "300 plus staff" give a grade to each player of between -2 and +2 on each play, and then they tweak and "normalize" those numbers in some way that makes sense to them, and finally they convert it all onto a 0-100 scale. As Dam points out, subjective input factors HEAVILY in these analyses and, by the way, what makes the -2 to +2 initial scale appropriate to begin with?

People just like this stuff because it attaches a number to a player's performance that give the impression of significance and objectivity, but looking under the hood reveals that it really doesn't and often the PFF numbers simply do not make sense - such as Leonard being ranked behind Vander Esch. These kind of things then generate lots of discussion, which has the unintended effect of boosting PFF's profile even more - so PFF isn't going anywhere anytime soon.