AU-panther

And how exactly do defenses game plan for an OT?

There is slot of truth to this. People need to remember on game day only 8 OL might be active. If Erving, Elflein, Paradis, Miller and Moton are starters, who are the 3 backups? And what positions do they back up? When you look at it like that you can understand why they don’t have him active, even if you don’t agree with them. Personally i was hoping Elflein could be the back up center then BC and Daley or Scott could cover the LG and the OT spots. Then Brown could just be backup RG and we still would have a good bit of coverage if 1-2 guys were to get hurt.

Honestly I think our staff has a bit of a college mentality. You recruit kids with good traits and you turn them into good football players. There is a reason we keep going after these high draft pick free agents who have struggled elsewhere.

I really thought they liked Elflein as a guard/back up center, and possible take over for Paradis next year. Elflein was actually drafted pretty high as a center prospect. As a pure guard the signing made no sense at all.

exactly Not every position on your football team is going to have a great player, that's the point of the salary cap. Not every free agent is going to be above average or even average. The problem with these signings is we did early and we overpaid. If you are patient you can find "cheaply".

was he the best though? could we not have waited and got a terrible guard later in free agency and just paid closer to the minimum?

and your point is?

code for "the guys we thought were going to be good aren't so we might have to do something" ? This way we can blame it on the rookies for not being ready instead of our choice of going with the wrong guy?

Second week into the season and we are still trying to figure this out? is this when posters proceed to tell us not to have opinions as fans and that the "football people" know best?

I never said CMC was bad, and PFF agrees, they love him. He has been one of their highest rated RBs since he has been in the league. A single game grade doesn't say otherwise. Just because he got a 69 (which isn't horrible) for one game and Ian got a higher grade doesn't mean that their system is flawed, it means people around here are too stupid or lazy to understand how their system works. They explain in pretty good detail how their grading works but I seriously doubt anyone on this website who likes to bash them has actually took the time to read it. Case in point the "they don't the plays" aregumetn that is overplayed and which they adress. Not to mention nobody has yet to come with a better system.

go look it up on a side note you just gave a perfect example of what is wrong with most fan evaluation. Fans form their opinion off of a handful of splash plays, could be bad plays or great plays. Also chances are that will probably be the only time you will see Mosely all year, so how exactly can you decide how good Thompson is if you don't know how all of the other LBs in the league played for the rest of the year.

What did you say that I said was wrong? I asked you to name a better source for comparing players across the league? Have you done that? No but you correct to a degree about one thing Just as there are people who think PFF is trash because they don't understand it there are some that blindly follow PFF who also don't understand it and therefore come to the wrong conclusion based off of what PFF presents.

On a side note, something to maybe learn about drafting from looking at Slater's success so far. During draft season we all get caught up with trying to evaluate players, often looking at production vs measurables and you can make an argument for both. Someone like Little had good overall tape and measurables but struggled at the senior bowl, Slater didn't have great measurables but excelled against great competition. Someone like Gaulden had good tape but not the measurables to translate. Slater's measurables were not the best but his production was great, but more importantly his production against good players was also great at the college level, mostly his game against Chase. So maybe measurables help you to predict if production can translate to the next level but if that player already has production against next level talent then the measurables aren't that important. In short, maybe his game tape from his matchup against Chase Young at the college level should have held more weight in the evaluation process.

my response was to someone who said that LT was in a different stratosphere than other positions. That is a bit of an overstatement and Cams history doesn't change that. That also doesn't mean I don't think LT is important. Maybe if Cam had better receivers than he wouldn't have had to hold on to the ball as long. How many hits did Cam take in his career after his first read was covered? How many hits did he take on designed runs? More goes into a QB getting hit than just the LT Here again, I'm not saying LT isn't important, or that Cam wouldn't have benefited from better O-line play, but this idea that an elite LT adds exponentially more wins to your team than an elite CB is ludicrous and outside of some weak anecdotal arguments nobody has yet to make a good argument otherwise.

Contribution or production is often a product of usage and the players around you, PFF tries to remove some of that. The value of their grades are nothing more than trying to compare players in how they performed for the snaps they did get. For example, RB A gets 100 yards on 25 carries. A lot of RBs would get 100 yards on 25 carries, that can be a product of usage, not necessarily ability. Maybe RB A had a good O-line and honestly most of those carries weren't really that impressive. Most of those runs were ones where you could objectively say most any other RB would have done just as well. His grade probably won't be that impressive Whereas RB B gets 40 yards on 10 carries, but his O-line was terrible. Most of his yards were after contact and he broke a lot of tackles. He will probably get a pretty good grade. Traditional stat based evaluation RB A looks better, had more production, but is he the better RB? With a small sample size can these grades be very misleading? Of course. That is why I wouldn't get too worked up over this first game, even among the players that played a lot of snaps.

and you watch every player, of every team, for every snap? You don't good and bad are relative terms. Fans don't understand that when watching players. They create an artificial standard in their head of what constitutes good play out of a player and that is what they compare players to. For example, fan watches LT give up 5 sacks, and 20 pressures on the season. Fan thinks LT is trash because the fan is unrealistic and expects the QB to have 6 secs to throw on every pass. In reality maybe 5 sacks and 20 pressures would actually put that LT in the top third of LTs, so in reality that LT is good.

I enjoy helping people understand how things work. Most arguments about PFF are wrong, or at the very least incomplete, and if people took time to actually understand how they work they would realize that. Instead they just try to act like one of the cool kids and just baselessly bash them, although they have yet ever presented a better alternative.

Everyone seems confused about Ian over CMC in grade. PFF doesn't strictly grade production. Its basically the ratio of bad, average, and good plays. Wide open dump offs to CMC aren't really going to help CMCs grade much. His production might look good on the stat sheet but not his PFF grade. Those are plays that any RB can make, that is more of a product of usage than ability. Now if he makes a great catch on a poorly thrown ball that will be more of a positive grade or if he makes a defender miss after he catches the pass. Also less snaps can actually make a good grade easier. If Ian Thomas plays 10 snaps, does an average job on 8 of them and has 2 really good snaps he might end up with a better grade than someone who plays 50 snaps. Nobody is saying Ian is the better player than CMC.

This argument about which position is more valuable can go on forever. A great D-line can make your secondary look better, or a great secondary can give a D-line time to be great. A great LT can give your QB time to pass to a WR, or what if your WRs are really good and the first read is always open? Most sacks happen after the first read. This idea that one position is more important to winning and losing to a degree of multiples is ludicrous, outside of QB of course, an elite CB and and elite LT will both help your team tremendously and difference between the two is alot smaller than people on here think. With that being said I would still put a higher emphasizes on finding OTs in the draft than CBs, but for a different reason. I think good to great OTs, especially LTs are harder to find. Also goods one, heck even average ones are more expensive in free agency. Think about this, lets say you spend a first round pick on a LT and he turns out to be average, its still a decent pick because average ones are expensive in free agency.

Nope, but they might deliberately sign former high draft picks who have previously played really bad thinking they can coach them up.

I’m not sure 2 games counts as statistically compelling. Even with all of the pressure that Tampa bay got on Mahomes he was still often able to buy time and get good passes off, just so happened his receivers were still covered.

True, they don’t know the plays but most football people can sit down and watch a game and figure out the assignments on most plays. Even if they are wrong 10% of the time that margin of error will probably end up being applied fairly evenly across all of the players. Here again name a better source for grading all of the players relative to each other?

Based on what exactly? there has actually been some analytics that has tried to quantify such, much like baseball with the idea of WAR rating. The numbers are closer than you would think.

Compared to? What do you have that is better to compare all of the players in the league relative to each other?

For those of you surprised by Matt’s grade you need to remember PFF o-line grades are based on both passing and rushing snaps. Go look at Paradis run grade vs pass grade. Also fans tend to grade offensive lineman based off of the occasional terrible play but occasionally that doesn’t tell you the full picture. Player A can give up 2 pressures, 1 sack, no penalties, and block great in the run game. Player B can give up 5 pressures, 0 sacks, 2 penalties and have several missed blocks in the run game. A lot of fans will think player A played worse because all they notice or remember is the one sack.