People are aiming at Cris Collinsworth and his Pro Football Focus. They already hit him over his Patrick Mahomes love. However, Collinsworth said he stands behind the PFF ratings and invited J.J. Watt to see the process.
Collinsworth defended his company, according to a post on YouTube by the Up & Adams Show.
“JJ, come on over, we’ll give you anything you want for your announcing,” Collinsworth said.
Watt said, “The number one issue with PFF by far, bar none, hands down is their player grading system and the fact that they project it everywhere, including nationally televised games on Sunday night, where everybody’s watching. And they make it underneath the rankings, where it states as fact ’91st out of 97th defensive tackles.’… that is a completely made-up number.”
Cris Collinsworth said the PFF process works
It’s a detailed thing, and a lot of work and money go into it, Collinsworth said.
“A lot of people have their own opinions,” he said. “We grade things, we evaluate things. Bijan Robinson has a couple of fumbles, and that’s hurt his grade. And he’s arguably been the best back in all of football this year. So there’s always a complaint. But you know we’ve spent literally millions of dollars trying to perfect this system.
“Every NFL team, every college team, every Canadian Football League team has it. We’re building the same thing for soccer right now around the world. Everybody uses it, every announcer almost, other than a couple. I think it’s easy to criticize if you haven’t seen how the potato chips are made, but open invitation to all those guys.”
Collinsworth said it’s about effort and accumulating enough information to make PFF what it is today.
“The bottom line is that you need all the data you can get,” Collinsworth said. “I think where a lot of people get emotional is where we rank the players. That all started with the draft. We would rank the players from one to 500, or whatever it was. But we studied those guys. We evaluated every single player in college football. Can you imagine how much time and energy that takes? And we said we’ve got the same thing in the National Football League. Let’s rank the players.”
