Facing questions from across NFL media as to whether he could live up to the standard of his heroic sophomore season, Chicago Bears quarterback Caleb Williams more than met the moment in Week 1.
Williams scored four total touchdowns as the Bears put up a whopping 59 points, setting a strong pace after his head coach suggested Chicago could be the highest-scoring team in the NFL this season.
Yet over at the analytics outlet Pro Football Focus, Williams graded out as the 20th-best QB in the league in Week 1. FS1’s Nick Wright, appalled by the rating, called it out on X on Monday morning.
“Our NFL statistical overlords @PFF watched all of Week 1 and determined that Caleb Williams, with an overall grade of 62.5, was the 20th-best quarterback this week,” he wrote.
It turns out Wright (who famously predicted Williams would make the Super Bowl as a rookie) wasn’t the only one. The outcry was so strong that PFF’s managing editor penned a column explaining the grade. The piece cited Wright’s tweet while defending PFF’s human-run grading system. Williams’ “accurate throw rate” supposedly lagged behind his actual completion percentage, and PFF docked him for a goal-line interception that was negated by a penalty.
The explanation wasn’t good enough for Wright, who on his What’s Wright podcast on Tuesday called out the analytics company’s evaluation process.
“Where some of these independent evaluators get a little high on their own supply is not recognizing … it’s not math and it’s not an exact science, and your formula you’re talking about is just a f*cking guy giving grades,” he said.
“It’s not a baseball player’s WAR, which is just, ‘We’re putting the numbers into a formula; the numbers are non-debated facts,’ and then spitting it out. There is a lot of art to what you’re calling science.
“And what I think they consistently fail to recognize is there needs to be a common-sense factor to: ‘Hold on a second, guys. I know our grader went through every play and charted every play and came away with this grade.’ But does it make sense for us to put out into the world? Is it accurate? Is it actually what we’re trying to say, that in Week 1, Caleb Williams’ play garnered a 62.5 grade while Sam Darnold, who threw three passes and then pulled his butt muscle, garnered a 62.3? We good with that?”
While PFF doesn’t call its grading system a “formula,” it does apply numerical ratings to quarterback dropback outcomes. And it uses inexact human evaluations to determine things like “perfectly placed” throws.
The site has also popularized statistical measurements for common football terms, which Wright also mocked in his rant on Tuesday.
“We’ve taken phrases that guys say to each other, hammered, on Heinekens at a bar on Sunday watching RedZone,” Wright said. “‘That was a big-time throw.’ And we’ve defined it beyond a shadow of a doubt. Get the f*ck out of here.”
To make matters more confusing, the site’s original response to Wright on X noted that Williams ranks fourth in its quarterback impact rankings. That metric weighs a QB’s more traditional, box score-based statistics more heavily than others in the league.
Wright said on his podcast that PFF’s problem may be its “messaging,” if people are so frequently confused by what its statistics are trying to say. That has always been part of the problem with PFF, which runs public-facing channels as well as a private platform (now a separate company, after Cris Collinsworth sold it) that teams use behind the scenes.
PFF no longer tags players with a score during the intros on NBC’s Sunday Night Football, but it still stymies fans and creates a mismatch between what we see on the field and what grades tell us about a player’s performance.
About Brendon Kleen
Brendon is an Editorial Lead at Awful Announcing overseeing digital content and special projects. He lives in Phoenix and has covered sports media for Awful Announcing since 2023.