Pro Football Focus has been a goldmine for hardcore football fans. The service provides a detailed statistical breakdown beyond the box score, or whatever stat ESPN creates and forces upon America. PFF doesn’t just break down the skill position players, who have quantifiable stats like catches, rushing yards, and touchdowns to judge their performance. Where it truly excels is in the grading of players who don’t get a lot of media attention like interior offensive linemen. PFF is a favorite tool of beat writers, fantasy football players, and fans alike.
And now it is expanding.
In what is a natural expansion, PFF will be launching a college football site this year. Pro Football Focus announced the news on their website:
After an arduous process of trialing, testing, and recruiting that started during the middle of the 2013 season, Pro Football Focus is proud to announced that we have gone to college and finished our first class. 870 FBS games (and a couple of All Star ones) have got the PFF treatment. Every player of every game on every play has been put the under our microscope in a project that we have very originally titled College Football Focus.
Whether you’re a five star recruit at Alabama or a walk on Iowa State you’ve got exactly the same opportunity to impress our graders, and that is the driving force behind “CFF”. We don’t want to follow the pack, but rather find things that others are not. We don’t want to confirm what you know, but make you think. We want to do more and do it more comprehensively.
While there will be no comparable premium section available for subscription to the general public, we will be using the data to generate content that will be free for everyone to read and absorb on the site in the coming weeks. Expect profiles on players. Expect breakdowns on positional groups. Expect mock drafts on what we would do. And expect us to listen to your feedback because we’re all in on this. College Football Focus is no longer our dream, but our reality. And we hope you enjoy it.
The company also included an announcement from important football person and PFF investor Cris Collinsworth touting the development:
When I made the investment in Pro Football Focus I asked Neil Hornsby if it were possible to do the same detailed grades on every player in every NCAA FBS game that Pro Football Focus does for every NFL game.
Less than six months later, our team of 90+ analysts amazingly pulled it off. Twenty-five thousand man hours later, we now have the most comprehensive study of NCAA football ever attempted. Pro Football Focus now partners with both NFL and NCAA teams to provide coaches with opponent scouting, self-scouting, and draft analysis services.
For the first time we are now ready to share most of this detailed analysis with our fans on Pro Football Focus. The same analysts that so many of us in the media trusted during recent NFL seasons, will now be your trusted source for the 2015 NFL Draft and the 2015 NCAA season. We hope you enjoy our coverage as much as we have enjoyed producing it.
What’s great about this information is that there will be data and analysis available free of charge. Pro Football Focus is one of the few sites that you can say has truly been a gamechanger in the internet/digital age. They are able to provide analysis and statistics that breaks through the cluttered landscape and truly stands out. To see that now grow and include the college game – from Ohio State to Ohio University – is a welcome development.
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