SANTA CLARA, Calif. — The grades arrived at 9 a.m. Monday, with offensive tackle Trent Williams prominently positioned at the head of the class with a rare 95.6 score.
Safety Kevin Winston Jr. was at the bottom with a lowly 28.1 overall grade. The star pupil among pass catchers? It was tight end George Kittle at 90.1. The best pass-rushing mark went to lineman Jeffery Simmons, who came away with a 78.9 in that category.
Seventeen and a half hours after the San Francisco 49ers’ 37-24 win over the Tennessee Titans, Pro Football Focus had dissected every aspect of the game, from how long Brock Purdy had to throw when using play-action (an eternity: 4.09 seconds) to how Cam Ward performed when blitzed (not so hot: He was 2 of 6 for 9 yards). The analytics service also assigned 0-100 grades — usually in multiple categories — for the 94 players who played at least one snap. And it did that for all 14 of Sunday’s NFL games.
When it comes to the public, those grades have become day-after catnip, at times replacing the traditional box score as the lens through which players are judged.
NBC displays players’ PFF rankings during its “Sunday Night Football” telecast. (The broadcast’s color analyst, Cris Collinsworth, bought a majority share of PFF in 2014 and is the company’s chairman.) News outlets regularly publish PFF grades as a quick after-game item. When a team signs a little-known player, superfans, podcasters and reporters immediately consult the site to figure out what positions he’s played — for example, is he a right or left tackle? A pass-catching tight end or a blocker? — how proficient he’s been and how he might fit on his new roster.
The teams are consumers, too. Pro Football Focus works with all 32 NFL teams as well as 241 college programs, delivering data from the weekend’s games to its NFL clients by noon (ET) on Mondays so they can start preparing for the upcoming opponent. The applications vary from team to team, and grades are only part of the value. The company’s charting data includes more than 150 possible categories — like what route the X receiver ran or whether the defense played press or off coverage — for every play.
Not everyone, however, is a fan.
Asked if he pays attention to PFF grades, 49ers blocking tight end Luke Farrell smiled and said, “Not at all.”
“There are so many moving parts to any play, especially a run play,” he said. “It’s really hard to break down and diagnose who did a bad job. It’s really hard to dissect that if you’re not in the offense.”
Said fellow tight end Jake Tonges: “Sometimes you’ll feel like you played a great game, and the PFF score doesn’t reflect that. Or sometimes it’s like you might have messed some stuff up, but it doesn’t show up in your grade. There’s just a lot of context to each play, so I always take (the grades) with a grain of salt.”
In October, former defensive end Chris Long railed against the use of PFF grades on “Sunday Night Football” after Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes was depicted as the league’s 13th-best quarterback.
“God forbid there’s somebody watching the game who doesn’t know who f—ing Patrick Mahomes is,” Long complained on his “Green Light” podcast. “They’re going to be badly misguided, brother. Thirteenth-best quarterback in the league?”
Fellow defensive end and three-time NFL Defensive Player of the Year J.J. Watt went a step further, saying, “PFF has a ton of great stuff; player grading sucks. Stop putting it out.”
Collinsworth responded by inviting critics to see PFF’s system and propose a better approach.
“It’s easy to criticize if you haven’t seen how the potato chips are made, but an open invitation to all those guys,” he said. “Anybody who wants to come in and take a look, debate, argue, sit down, pound the table.”
The concept of player grades is intuitive and easy to digest, which partly explains why PFF has become so popular. How those grades are calculated, however, is little understood. So The Athletic spoke with two of the company’s longtime evaluators, Ben Stockwell and Billy Moy, about the process of grading a typical game like Titans-49ers.
“It’s not (an evaluator) watching a game and then saying, ‘We think Trent Williams is about a 76.9 for that game,’” said Stockwell, the company’s VP of data collection. “It’s all based on play-by-play grading. So we’re evaluating what Trent Williams’ role was on a play, and did he do that well, did he do that poorly or did he do it as he was expected to do?”
Stockwell said the process begins with the broadcast. Depending on their experience, one or two evaluators will start watching at kickoff, using a DVR to go over a single play multiple times to evaluate every player involved.
Moy, who is PFF’s head of analysis, has been grading for a decade and can handle a broadcast by himself. Less experienced analysts will split a game, with one grading Team A’s offense and Team B’s defense and the other handling the opposite. The goal is to have the initial data no later than 30 minutes after the final whistle.
“I finish probably 15 to 20 minutes after the game is over,” Moy said. “Thanks to all the commercial breaks the NFL likes to give us, plus halftime and things like that, it helps me keep up. When the game hits halftime in real time, I probably still have a drive to go before I get to halftime.”
During that initial sweep, players get a mark for every play they’re involved in. There are four degrees of positive marks — 0.5, 1, 1.5 and 2 — and four degrees of negative ones.
The fourth degree is difficult to achieve. Stockwell gave an example in which two running backs ran for 60-yard touchdowns. Because the first runner benefited from a perfectly blocked play and had a wide-open field, he might get only a .5 grade. The second runner, however, broke four tackles and outran a safety to the end zone, getting the highest mark possible.
“It’s different from the box score, which is: This is what happened,” Stockwell said. “We’re evaluating how well someone has contributed to make that happen. If Brock Purdy launches a deep ball to Jauan Jennings, hits him in the hands and he drops it, we’re giving Brock Purdy a positive grade for that play because he’s doing everything he can to make it a success.”
At game’s end, all the marks are tallied and converted into a 0-100 scale. Grades above 70 are considered above average. Grades over 90 are elite and fairly uncommon. Just three players in the Titans-49ers game had overall grades in the 90s: Williams, Purdy (91.0) and Titans right guard Kevin Zeitler (90.9). Williams’ 95.6 mark is considered exceptional. It was the best single-game grade in his 15 NFL seasons and the third highest for an offensive lineman this year behind Detroit Lions tackle Penei Sewell (98.7 in Week 3) and Tampa Bay Buccaneers tackle Tristan Wirfs (97.0 on Sunday).
.@Titans @49ers this is perfectly executed Crack Toss…A Pin and Pull…Well done is better than well said. #BaldysBreakdowns pic.twitter.com/z00ZQK3D7v
— Brian Baldinger (@BaldyNFL) December 16, 2025
Moy stressed that the play-by-play marks don’t hinge on the success of the play. For example, he went over a first-down snap in the 49ers’ Oct. 19 game against the Atlanta Falcons in which running back Brian Robinson Jr. was stopped for a 2-yard gain on a run to the left. On the other side of the formation, Farrell and right tackle Colton McKivitz sealed off defensive lineman Ta’Quon Graham so thoroughly that McKivitz was able to peel away and block safety Xavier Watts as well. Even though the play was a dud, Farrell and McKivitz got positive grades on that snap.
When the initial grades are finished, Moy, who lives in Rochester, N.Y., will take a break and wait for the all-22 version — a bird’s eye view of a game — to come in that evening. For a PFF grader, the all-22’s arrival is akin to a bell going off in a firehouse.
“I’ll be upstairs in my kitchen making dinner or doing the dishes or something like that, and I’ll have Slack open with my alert set,” Moy said. “And as soon as I get pinged that the film is in, it’s kind of drop what I’m doing, my wife takes over upstairs and I start grinding away on film.”
The review of the all-22 helps sharpen the initial grades and allows evaluators to see certain sequences — downfield routes and coverage, or special teams plays, for example — that are restricted in the broadcast version. Next comes another round of hyper-focused evaluations. Stockwell said a single game can have up to 10 sets of eyes scrutinizing it before it’s available to teams and subscribers.
It helps that Stockwell and another evaluator live in the U.K.
“I’ll start working at 1 a.m. ET, which means I can pack off the Americans to sleep,” he said, “and they can wake up and have another overlap with me again when we’re doing the last bit of work between 8 a.m. and noon ET.”
Stockwell said the hardest part of the game to grade, for him at least, is pass coverage.
“Because there are situations where there is literally no one covering this (receiver) and I’m not sure (how to grade it),” he said. “Coverage, to me at least, is the area I often look at the most and go, ‘I need an extra set of eyes on this.’”
The most complicated aspect to grade? Running plays, because there are so many players involved and so many individual battles that can have domino effects elsewhere.
The key, Stockwell said, is figuring out the intent and assignment on each play. And for that, Pro Football Focus leans on a team of experts, which in the past has included 49ers scout Steve Slowik (who’s credited in part with identifying Purdy as a potential draft pick in 2022) and his brother, Bobby, a former 49ers offensive assistant who is now the Miami Dolphins’ passing game coordinator. Detroit Lions assistant Bruce Gradkowski and Falcons offensive coordinator Zac Robinson are also PFF alumni. Current insiders include former Illinois and Toledo head coach Tim Beckman and former fullback Winston Dimel.
When the film shows a miscommunication or a busted assignment, these experts help determine the likely intent of the play. Stockwell said Beckman, a former defensive coordinator, is particularly helpful at diagnosing coverage busts.
Stockwell says he doesn’t shrink from criticism he hears. He wants it, especially if it’s coming from players and teams.
“We definitely get feedback from teams in terms of, ‘We don’t think this is a negative grade, we think it was a positive grade,’” he said. “It varies by team. Some teams, we don’t hear any of that from. Some teams, we hear little bits and pieces. But any time we get feedback, it’s an opportunity to improve what we do.”
And not every player is a critic.
Quarterback Mac Jones said he won’t look at his PFF grades during the season. Like most NFL players, he gets his game-by-game evaluations from his position coach, who goes over each snap with his pupils.
But he describes himself as “kind of a nerd” when it comes to analytics, and he’ll look at the grades after the season.
Are they accurate?
“Sometimes, I would say,” he said. “I don’t know what the grading technique is. I’ve had games where I felt I played amazing and had a terrible PFF grade and vice versa. I think it’s random, kind of. But when you gather a large amount of data, it’s going to be a little more accurate. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong. But it is interesting.”
