Cris Collinsworth addresses PFF controversy around Caleb Williams’ Week 1 grade

Caleb Williams torched the Panthers for four touchdowns and 59 points in Week 1, yet Pro Football Focus still ranked him the 20th-best quarterback of the week. And Cris Collinsworth, of all people, understands exactly why fans have a problem with that.

“I would have probably said what the fans said, you know, he had a terrific day,” Collinsworth said on The PFF Show alongside his son, Jac. “I mean, he did. The big plays were plays that we gave him double-pluses on.”

“I understand why there’s a controversy” – @CollinsworthPFF pic.twitter.com/sobN5xghAw

— PFF (@PFF) September 16, 2026

Collinsworth claimed Williams earned three of those “double-plus” grades, PFF’s top rating, on a wheel-route touchdown he called “brilliant,” a scrambling diving-catch connection, and a scramble for a touchdown of his own. Weighed against that were seven negative plays, though Collinsworth noted one of those didn’t actually count. The play in question was a goal-line interception. Williams never saw a defensive lineman drop into coverage and threw it right to him. A penalty on the defense wiped the play off the box score, but not off PFF’s grade.

“I don’t think anybody knew there was a flag thrown on the play until after the play,” Collinsworth said. “So he did, in fact, throw the interception. He did, and it was a bad one, and it was a -1.5 on our scale.”

The rest of the negative plays were smaller stuff — a sack taken when a check-down was open five yards away, a delay-of-game penalty, and a couple of overthrown routes downfield, including a wheel route to Cole Kmet. None of it was disqualifying on its own, which is part of why Collinsworth said he understands the pushback.

at 2:08 he says the wheel route to Kmet was a negative play, which is where the “you don’t know the playcall” argument comes in

looks like Caleb is expecting Kmet to run a corner, which is exactly what he does when CHI runs the same play later in the game https://t.co/C6xDj8u2x3 pic.twitter.com/y7aq2Whaul

— Steven Ruiz (@theStevenRuiz) September 17, 2026

“I understand why there’s a controversy,” Collinsworth said, acknowledging that most of what he watched matched what Bears fans saw with their own eyes. “People are so excited in Chicago right now, and they should be. This is really fun, what’s happening in Chicago. They’ve been down in the dumps for a while. They got a coach. They got a quarterback. They’re pumped up… they’re protecting their guy. God love him. I probably would be too.”

Some of that pushback came in the form of Nick Wright. On his What’s Wright with Nick Wright? podcast, the FS1 host chalked up PFF’s grading system as “just a f*cking guy giving grades,” insisting it lacks the mathematical rigor of a statistic like baseball’s WAR, where raw numbers feed a formula without human interpretation muddying the result. He pointed to the fact that Williams’ 62.5 grade for Week 1 sat nearly identical to Sam Darnold’s 62.3, despite Darnold departing the game after three passes with an injruy as well as Pro Football Network’s separate quarterback impact metric — a formula weighted more heavily toward conventional statistics — ranking Williams fourth in the league that same week.

“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.”

Collinsworth acquired majority ownership of PFF in 2014 and spent the following decade transforming it into the analytics infrastructure NFL and college front offices pay handsomely to license, before divesting the company’s business-to-business data operation to Teamworks earlier this year in a transaction exceeding $100 million. The sale bifurcated PFF into two entities: Teamworks absorbed the proprietary data platform front offices rely on internally, while Collinsworth retained the consumer-facing apparatus — which saw significant layoffs across its content team in the weeks after the sale closed, costing PFF’s podcast host, social media leads, and several of its writers and analysts their jobs — and accepted an advisory role at Teamworks as part of the deal.

While Collisnworth fronts the grading system under fire, and there’s plenty of fire to front, he isn’t exactly pushing back on the criticism. PFF stopped displaying scores during player introductions on Sunday Night Football — much to J.J. Watt’s delight — though the gap between what fans watch and what the grades say hasn’t gone away. And Collinsworth admits that if he were watching as a fan instead of grading as an analyst, he’d probably be reacting the same way Bears fans are.