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So many reporters quote them. I don’t. I respect how hard they work, but I’m with Bill Belichick on this one . . .
I’m talking about Pro Football Focus, an analytics site that has become wildly popular. They break down a lot of game film and rank players in various ways.
They recently expanded their operation to evaluate draft prospects also.
The reason I’m bringing them up here is that they are destroying the Jets selection of Christian Hackenberg in the second round. They rated him as the second worst second-day selection behind Tampa Bay picking Florida State kicker Roberto Aguayo. Here is what they wrote about Hackenberg. There was no by-line on this, so that I was I’m not providing a writer’s name.
2. Jets: Christian Hackenberg, QB, Penn State (No. 51 overall)
“Hackenberg was the lowest-graded quarterback in our 2014 college stats, as a true sophomore. He improved a bit as a junior, but still had the second-lowest accuracy percentage in the FBS (64.0 percent). You can’t teach arm strength, but it’s also fairly difficult to teach accuracy, and it’s hard to see Hackenberg ever getting to an NFL level in that respect. Fellow PFF analyst Sam Monson broke down Hackenberg’s game leading up to the draft, and the results weren’t pretty. We had an undrafted free agent grade on him in our PFF draft rankings, and he wound up going in the second round.
As for Monson, he wrote before the draft about Hackenberg, “Others have said that his performance on tape is worrying enough that he should drop further than the second tier of passers, but the tools are still clearly there for him to potentially be an NFL-caliber quarterback. I hold a different opinion: I don’t believe Christian Hackenberg should even be drafted.
“That seems like hyperbole, and it is not intended to come across as a slam against a player who is working hard for his shot to play in the NFL. But the truth is that instead of hyperbole it is actually an honest assessment backed up by three years of play-by-play grading, tape study and data.”
So these guys are much smarter than Mike Maccagnan and Chan Gailey? Maybe, but I doubt it.
Before I continue, let me tell you what Bill Belichick said about sites like this.
“With all due respect to those websites, I don’t really know how some of that information is determined or evaluated,” Belichick said on WEEI during the season. “I know that in the past, we’ve looked at those websites — not any one in particular — but just in general we’ve looked at those websites and said, ‘OK, here’s their top rated guy. Where are we?’ just to kind of gauge where we feel like the value of the websites are. If they’re rating them the same as we are, maybe that’s something we need to keep a close eye on so we can start to track a lot of guys. If there’s some big discrepancy, is there really any value to that? I’d say a lot of that stuff is not real accurate, so take it with a grain of salt.”
Grain of salt is right.
These guy work very hard. I will give them that. Going over games with a fine tooth comb takes a lot of time, and it’s tedious.
But there are so many variables that go into every play, and unless we know the play call from the coaches, it’s often hard to discern responsibility. So you might think the quarterback threw a bad pick, but perhaps the receiver ran the wrong route. Or it looks like a cornerback got burned, but it was the safeties’ fault.
Carolina Panthers tight end Greg Olson went off on these sites a few months ago.
“These ‘analytics’ sites are such a joke when comes to player performance,” Olson tweeted. “Merit is in raw data collection.”
Look, I have no idea if Hackenberg is going to pan out.
Nobody does.
But I wouldn’t get too caught up in PFF’s evaluation.
We don’t know enough about who is doing the grading or what perimeters they are using.
May 5, 2016
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