Attentive viewers would have noticed a big change in Sunday Night Football’s presentation for the curtain raiser of the 2026 NFL season, as the Seattle Seahawks hosted the New England Patriots.
One of SNF’s traditions is player introductions, where players share their name and college, high school, or whatever else they want to shout out. In years past, it was also accompanied by their Pro Football Focus position ranking to give fans an idea of how they compared to their peers in the league.
However, those PFF rankings were gone for the Patriots-Seahawks game, replaced by each player’s hometown.
That drew the attention of new NFL on CBS lead analyst J.J. Watt, a vocal critic of Pro Football Focus and its rankings. He commented on social media, “This is a fantastic development.”
This is a fantastic development. https://t.co/tPfWQKihL6
— JJ Watt (@JJWatt) September 10, 2026
J.J. Watt has criticized Pro Football Focus and their grading scales on multiple occasions. Last fall, he said that their positional rankings were made-up numbers.
“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,” Watt told Pat McAfee in October 2025.
As for why Sunday Night Football suddenly stopped using PFF rankings after years of doing so, it likely relates to the company’s sale earlier this year. Longtime NBC analyst Cris Collinsworth became the company’s majority owner in 2014, but sold its enterprise data to Teamworks in a deal reportedly worth $100 million earlier this year. A number of people on the content side were then laid off as part of the sale.
Collinsworth maintained ownership of the platform’s public elements, and PFF is still developing grades and rankings. It’s unclear why SNF has stopped using the data, but it may relate to the sale. Whatever the reason behind the switch, at least it will save J.J. Watt some headaches on Sunday nights.
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