It's not really cherrypicking so much as pointing out that he's very much improved over the course of the season. It's not like I'm removing three bad games spaced out throughout the season. It's clear he's been playing GREAT - not just great for a rookie, but great for an NFL starter - since week 4.
I'm also pretty sure this was the first cold weather football game Mac had ever played in his life. Not making excuses, but its good to get that under his belt and be largely successful because there will be plenty of those games in the future (starting next week). Throwing a football in 35 degree weather is just different.
Yeah he should definitely get credit for that one. I think it was one of his better balls of the day. The defender has his back turned and he gave Bourne a chance.
This is far and away the funniest part of PFF grades. I’m already used to seeing this sort of nonsense in my day job (100 pt scale wine ratings are a bit of a running joke to many of us in the industry), but adding even more false precision with a decimal is hilarious.
Yeah this is weird shit.
I think people are overreacting to Mac's PFF score this week. I'm not familiar with PFF methodolgy, but overall on the year, he rates quite highly (4th in the league headed into the game), so it is not an issue of PFF metric/people shitting on Mac. Their rating scale likes him and to the extent that there is subjectivity in it, it usually seems to work in his favor.
So basically PFF gave him the worst possible rating on their scale. If only Stidham had started the pats would of won by 50.Just for the record, I take no issue with PFF giving Mac a bad grade, good grade, whatever grade. I don't really care about that at all.
My broader issue is that PFF grades are arbitrary and meaningless, because they don't correspond to anything. It's circular logic disguised as scientific analysis.
Just wanted to make sure I was clear on that.
Just a note because I’ve seen people mention this a few times: the clock management at the end of the first half was not Mac’s fault. Bolden running out of bounds resulted in the poor clock management, and Meyers stepping out of bounds on what should have been an easy catch resulted in the long FG attempt. It’s not entirely fair to pin those on Mac
For the record:
Unless PFF has some cumulative effect that 7 games exactly like yesterday would give him a different rating, but I don't see how.
If so, it's possible that was two guys trying to correct a disconnect they've had a couple times this season. Mac's thrown a couple endzone misses which went deep while Henry went horizontal, not impossible they both went the other direction this time. Hope they get on the same page, because if so there's our red zone TD problem handled.
I am not sure based on the above that you understood the critique, frankly. I also am not sure about PFF QB ratings and haven't seen a robust statistical analysis, though I have always been dubious because what they are doing is really, really tough to do well on a consistent basis especially as to QBs. I suspect (again, just my own observations) that QB play is MUCH harder for them to do well than most positions as the range of options and the number of variables they face is so high and this (I suspect) means they simply can't do a QB assesment worth much even as they are used a good deal for other positions.
I understand the critique, but people comparing say yesterday's single game score to Wilson's season, then comping a season based on all yesterday's against Wilson's don't understand what the grade is or what it's saying. Jones' grade is low because PFF thinks he made a good number of bad throws yesterday and not many really good ones, that the bad one's were not picked, and in fact caught, and that he got yards and TDs from big YAC and catches they think were on not good throws, means there is a disparity between his grade and the stats. At the same time... let's say he makes every one of those same throws, but neither TD happens because the WR doesn't catch it or run with it, Meyers never makes an adjustment and the long gain goes away, and his worst 2 throws get picked. PFF would have him with the same grade, but the stats would say something like 18/30 220 yards 0 TDs, 2 INT. He made all the same throws. Would we then say... oh yeah he was worse than Zach Wilson's season because it projects to 0 TDs and 24 TDs... of course not.
He would have to make all the exact same throws, AND get the same outcomes... which is highly unlikely, and that's the point. The grade is quantifying the expected outcome, not the actual one.
I get you are pointing out the not great logic attacking PFF rather than defending PFF itself, but it must be said that especially in football removing the context of the receivers you are throwing to and the defenders who are on them to achieve some neutral "expected" outcome is doomed to fail precisely because those factors are a crucial component in good decision making from a QB.
My understanding is that individual game grades are essentially not scaled the same way as full season grades (so it's common for a guy to have a full season grade that's higher than his game grades would indicate). From the PFF website (their emphasis not mine)....
The counterargument would be that Tennessee's pass defense was unimpressive and that contributed to Mac's success. At the same time, Mac missed a few throws, and a couple of throws were more about great receiver play than Mac's own play. I don't think that's completely true, but it is partly true.
That's the rub for me. I thought the hanging curve analogy was good for what pff is trying to do. Except you can judge whether a curve is any good in total isolation from anything else. I think judging whether a pass "is any good" (except on the obvious margins) contains so many more moving parts as to make the overall number much more suspect.
Don't forget to throw out all the pitches the pitcher makes against the bottom of the lineup hitters who suck as I'd consider that an "expected pitch" so those really don't count. The Patriots run a ton of high % pass plays like screens and as Lazar pointed out and those are "expected throws" and don't count in PFF world. If you throw a high number of "expected throws" and fewer "normal throws" a single mistake are two are magnified in their ratings vs teams who run a more aggressive offense.
I think you're addressing a set of challenges different from that raised. If we don't trust the methodology and measurement on a single-game level then I'm not confident combining a lot of games fixes anything. Getting a larger sample works when we trust the measurement and are trying to address variance within any individual sample---but if we aren't even sure about what happened that to me is a different problem.
Again, I understand that. Even if you post "I don't know why people don't understand that" again. I said it seems WEIRD from the 30000 foot level that a game scores that low when we see what the actual results were--I understand process and results are different. Nowhere did I say "blow up PFF" or "if you subscribe to it you're a moron".
I realize we are all debating the application of a non-transparent methodology, which is itself problematic. But. The implication of what you suggest here would be that a QB like Mac won't rate will in this system, which I think is false - the Mac has been rated highly by PFF thorughout the season until this one game.
I think it is a clear limitation of their system. Mac threw a great ball, but the coverage was also great. I think on most throws, that ball with that coverage is an incompletion. On the other hand, that ball with less great coverage is an easy TD on most throws. Mac had to release early. Was there something he should have seen before he threw it that should have led to him not making the throw? Was Mac supposed to look the defender off first? I don't know, but even if there was some way he should have handled it differently I think it is in the realm of parsing things too finely. I'm guessing it is a general problem of the system that when a QB does something well but the defense also defends it well, the QB gets dinged more than he deserves.
