Pro Football Focus has finished releasing its list of the top 101 NFL players. I have some thoughts about this.

The first thought is that Pro Football Focus is often given a sort of gospel-level deference by sports journalists and bloggers. (If you search for “Pro Football Focus” at ESPN you get 17 pages of results, almost all of them ESPN writers citing Pro Football Focus numbers.) The reason for this deference is none of us has either the time or desire to grade every snap of every NFL player, so those handy positive and negative grades from PFF are useful.

The problem is those positive and negatives grades are themselves subjective, dependent on the evaluation of hordes of guys who do the actual evaluating. Nothing against the hordes of guys who do the evaluating, but PFF’s rating system is the sort of sportsy numbers thing that, despite its subjective and relative basis, passes itself off as objective and unbiased. That’s just not the case.

Another thought is I’m pretty happy the PFF guys think the Saints have five of the best players in the NFL, including fortieth-best Cam Jordan and forty-ninth-best Keenan Lewis. (They also rank Jimmy Graham thirteenth, which seems a little generous, but I’ll take that too.)

PFF ranks Drew Brees sixtieth, though. Six zero. 60. Were there 60 players better than Drew Brees in 2013? Maybe. I don’t think so, but okay. Was Drew Brees really the fourth-best player on the Saints’ roster last year? Again, I don’t think so. PFF ranks guys based on an all-positions-created-equal basis, and then determines who’s better than whom by figuring out how much better, comparatively, one guy is than the other guys at his position. But look: Keenan Lewis misses some time in 2013, and the Saints survive. That happens with Brees, they don’t.

I understand PFF’s rationale, but I think it’s emblematic of a faux-objectivity thing that sportswriters and sports evaluators set up as an outside authority to which they can appeal. Brees is sixtieth — that’s what the numbers say, man. Jeff Duncan can appeal to “facts” which aren’t facts so much as they are an NFL-desired conflation of unrelated storylines. You may already know how I feel about this sort of thing.

Anyway. I don’t have much of a problem with PFF or its rankings. I have more of a problem with Duncan’s piece today, but I wrote this instead.


Drew Brees Isn't Even the Best Saints Player, PFF Says | B&G