People just looking for some way to skew the numbers into something they can report on that nobody else has covered so it can be argued about to create ratings.

I do not have a problem with the concept that there are other players on the Saints playing their positions better than he is. Based on last season, it's not so crazy to say that Keenan Lewis is a better CB than Brees is a QB, or that Cameron Jordan is a better DL than Brees is a QB.

Where it falls apart is where you look at the importance of the QB relative to the other positions. I'm not of the opinion that the Saints would totally fall apart without Brees like some other people are. We have too much talent on both sides of the ball for that to happen. But I do have to admit, we would suffer a lot more losing Brees than we would a Keenan Lewis or Cameron Jordan.

Obviously they didn't take into account the other side of the equation, though. Morestead is probably the #1 punter in football, but he doesn't make the list at all. Which kind of blows apart the notion of all positions are being graded equally.

In general I like PFF though. They provide a service that nobody else really does and for the most part they do a good job. There are some head-scratchers from time to time, but if you read their methodology it's not hard to understand why that happens.

... a long time ago in a galaxy far, far way, none of those "grades", "power" rankings, stats, numbers mattered or even existed. "Stats are for baseball", was the usual musing.

Nowadays with the need for teh clix on the gazillion sports websites and viewership of the 24x7x365 sports networks, they need to find more and more artificial ways to keep those surfers/viewers coming back for more.

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