Mike Zimmer (Awesomely) Addresses PFF Ratings

Zimmer

Mike Zimmer met with reporters for an hour Wednesday, touching on a number of topics, but one that stood out was an offhand comment about the analytics website Pro Football Focus. Zimmer can be guarded in his answers at times, but is candid when he wants to be, and much of what was he said Wednesday fell on the side of the latter, including his assessment of PFF after a question about Jeremiah Sirles:

It’s not the first time Zimmer has publicly voiced reservations about Pro Football Focus ratings; in 2014, he made point to bring it up at a press conference after some Vikings (namely, Matt Kalil) were criticized by the site.

[quote_box_center]“I know the people that are grading our games and our defenses and our offenses, they don’t know if the tackle gets beat inside he wasn’t sliding out to the nickel, or who our guys are supposed to cover,” Zimmer told the Star Tribune. “I guarantee they don’t know who’s in our blitz package and what they’re supposed to do. I would just ask that everybody take that with a grain of salt, including our fans. We as coaches get paid a whole bunch of money to do the jobs that we do, evaluate the players that we evaluate and grade them how we grade them, not based on something else.”[/quote_box_center]

Wednesday’s comment was, of course, in specifically referencing guard/tackle Jeremiah Sirles. Sirles is an in-house frontrunner for the starting right guard spot in 2017, though Zimmer said in the same meeting with reporters he still has to “figure out” that position. The odd part is that PFF actually ranked Sirles reasonably well as a tackle last season (he was not rated as a guard); he was 49th among all tackles, and posted a nearly identical rating to new Vikings Riley Reiff and Mike Remmers.

Image via ProFootballFocus.com

Chances are, Zimmer was just voicing his frustration with the way fans (and bloggers) sometimes view these rankings as gospel. Certainly saying the fine folks at PFF “don’t know what they’re doing” is hyperbole and inaccurate, but Zimmer makes a valid point; ranking a player’s performance without full knowledge of scheme or assignments—which is impossible to have if you are outside the organization—is a fundamentally flawed process. An observer can assume Matt Kalil missed a block, but without knowing the protection and scheme, it’s not possible to be sure.

For example: maybe, if a tackle gets beat on the outside, a back or tight end was supposed to give help on the edge but didn’t, and thus the tackle react late, causing him to miss the block and appear to give up a sack. Or maybe he didn’t have help, and he just got beat. We simply can’t know without knowing the scheme.

Of course, this doesn’t invalidate what Pro Football Focus does; they spend hundreds of hours analyzing every play from the NFL season, and provide the football-viewing public with incredibly in-depth numbers. Which is why we should view their ratings as one tool to use when evaluating players—not the be-all and end-all, but one important piece of the puzzle.

Personally, I can’t blame Zimmer one bit for being frustrated. Often, PFF rankings are used as the sole data point by armchair quarterbacks arguing online, and anytime any metric is used as a single data point, it’s impossible to get the full picture. The work they do is valuable, but the evaluation of an NFL head coach should weigh at least as much.

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