Big Blue View readers were understandably upset this past Monday when I published the post discussing the New York Giants’ Pro Football Focus grades for their 33-32 loss to Denver the previous day. The primary subject of their ire was PFF’s ranking of Giants’ offensive players’ performances, in particular the lowest-ranked player on the list:
In fact, PFF has been mostly cool on rookie quarterback Jaxson Dart throughout his four starts — other than the Philadelphia game:
Courtesy of Pro Football Focus
This contrasts mightily with Giants fans’ view of Dart. Fans see Dart as the second coming of…Patrick Mahomes? Josh Allen? Probably not, but as something unlike anyone the Giants have had at that position since maybe Fran Tarkenton. Dart has injected excitement into a season that was starting to look all too much like recent seasons other than 2022. And it hasn’t just been the fans. The Eagles’ Vic Fangio was singing his praises to the press, though some of that is undoubtedly blowing smoke so as not to rile up your coming opponent. Dart did, though, slice up Fangio’s defense the week before last. Perhaps the most telling thing is that the broadcast team for this Sunday’s rematch is Kevin Burkhardt and Tom Brady, Fox’s lead team. Even Nik Bonitto, one of the participants in the online war of words before Sunday’s Giants-Broncos game, told Kay Adams that he was impressed with Dart:
So why isn’t PFF impressed? Do they have it in for Dart? Do they not know what they’re doing? (A common sentiment in BBV comments and on X.) Or something else?
The answer is that PFF measures certain things, and it doesn’t measure others. Specifically, PFF measures primarily the physical performance of a player. They tell us in their articles, and in their videos, how they do that. It starts with giving a grade to every player on every play, ranging from -2 to +2. The grade is relative to what is expected of a player on that specific type of play:
Courtesy of Pro Football Focus
Here’s another, more recent article, written by one of their graders. As he points out, if a QB completes a 3-yard slant, he gets a zero grade. He did what was expected, nothing more, nothing less. Departures from zero are reserved for doing something beyond expectations, and especially in important situations. Their example above for the quintessential +2 grade, the highest they can give on a play, is Eli Manning’s Super Bowl throw to Mario Manningham. That play had everything: Beautiful throw, way downfield, placed right in between two defenders where only Manningham could catch it, but not leading him out of bounds…and the key play in winning that Super Bowl. According to the article, even the league-leading QBs throw passes that are positively graded only 25-30% of the time, and even that number doesn’t account for whether the positive grade is +0.5 or +2.0. The same applies in reverse to poorly thrown, negatively graded plays.
How PFF combines all those grades on individual plays into a final grade on a scale from 0-100 isn’t exactly clear, but the article I linked to above has an interactive tool for the 2024 season that gives us some insight into how the distribution of very bad to ordinary to very good throws leads to the final grade you see after each game. Here, for example, is how Lamar Jackson, PFF’s top-rated 2024 quarterback, compared to Daniel Jones, their third-lowest among starters:
Courtesy of Pro Football Focus
You can see that the big differences between the two are Jackson’s much higher frequency of good but not great throws (light green), his much higher frequency of very good throws (green), and his relative absence of disastrous throws relative to Jones (red-deep orange). The majority of throws by both QBs, though, were just ordinary (yellow).
The vast majority of plays aren’t like Manning-to-Manningham. Even explosive plays, which PFF loves, aren’t always the doing of the quarterback. Remember this 59-yard completion from Drew Lock to Malik Nabers in last year’s Colts game?
Lock was probably given a 0 or +0.5 on that throw, because it was pretty easy and Nabers did all the work. Nabers had another TD earlier in the game of 31 yards that was the same story. The box score says that Lock was 17 of 23 for 309 yards and 4 TDs, with no interceptions, in that game. His PFF grade, though, was only 75.8 – above average to be sure, but nothing like you’d expect if you saw the traditional stats.
The flip side of this is the negatively graded plays, which are graded with the same philosophy. An important aspect of the PFF grading system is that they do not grade the result of a play, only how well or poorly a play was executed by each player responsible for it.
Remember the Giants’ (in)famous turf monster game in Philadelphia in 2020? The Giants had that game just about salted away when Daniel Jones threw a nice pass to Evan Engram on third down that Engram dropped. It was one of two drops Engram had that night, and although he caught six of eight passes, he only got a receiving grade of a below-average 55.6.
It’s interesting to compare Jaxson Dart to the QBs just above and below him in PFF’s pass grade rankings after this past week’s games:
Courtesy of Pro Football Focus
It’s pretty amazing how similar Dart’s conventional stats, as well as those peculiar to PFF, are to those of Michael Penix Jr. and C.J. Stroud in all the details. Dart has played less than the other two, but if you increase his stat numbers by 50% (because they’ve played six games while Dart has only played four, not counting his cameos when Russell Wilson was starting) you can see how close all three of them are. Here’s where another thing comes into play: Perception. Stroud, a former No. 2 draft pick, is widely seen as having regressed from his excellent rookie season. Dart, a rookie this season who entered with lower expectations as a low first-rounder, is seen as a revelation. Yet the two have similar completion rates as well as passing yards and TDs per game started.
Now let’s look at PFF’s top three quarterbacks in passing grade:
Courtesy of Pro Football Focus
What’s the difference? All three have played one more game than Penix and Stroud, so for that reason alone we expect their yards and TDs to be a little higher. As we said before, though, PFF doesn’t grade the outcomes of plays, i.e., yards and TDs, at least not directly. They grade how well the quarterback did his job. That’s not the same thing, because a QB may throw a beautiful pass way downfield and the receiver drops it, and he may throw an awful pass that should be intercepted and the defensive back doesn’t come down with the interception. PFF loves explosive pass plays (20+ yards) and PFF hates turnovers. Sam Darnold, Matthew Stafford, and Dak Prescott have about twice as many TDs as Penix, Dart, and Stroud…but they have about three times as many “big-time throws (BTT),” PFF’s term for the long passes downfield or very accurate intermediate passes into tight windows that they judge to be the hallmark of great QBs.
PFF also absolutely hates passes that should have been intercepted, whether or not they are actually intercepted. Comparing our first group of three quarterbacks to our second, we can see that Darnold, Stafford and Prescott combined have only 16 “turnover-worthy (TWP)” plays vs. the 23 that Penix, Dart, and Stroud have – and that’s with the first group having played collectively four more games than the second group.
These are the most likely reasons why Jaxson Dart got a low passing grade from PFF last Sunday. He did a lot of good things during that game – the Giants wouldn’t have put 32 points up if he hadn’t. And seemingly, he did a lot of things that PFF (presumably) does not and cannot grade on the mental side of things. For example, the TD pass to Daniel Bellinger:
Dart nicely steps up in the pocket and easily hits the wide-open Bellinger for 44 yards and a TD. I don’t know what grade PFF gave him for this pass. Surely not +2, because once he climbed the pocket it was a just a pitch and catch. He got credit for an explosive play for sure, because it was over 20 yards. What we don’t know, though, is whether PFF gave Dart credit for the pocket movement that Richard Sherman points out, or whether that is just not part of what they grade.
But, you say, that was only one of three TD passes that Dart threw against that tough Denver defense. But the other two were a pass that bounced off Wan’Dale Robinson’s hands to Theo Johnson, and a short pass to Cam Skattebo that Skattebo did most of the work on. PFF probably didn’t give Dart any more than a 0.5 (if even that) on either play, and rightly so.
There’s another part to the Bellinger play that comes before the clip above begins: Dart comes to the line of scrimmage, reads the defense, and audibles out to a different play. Without that, this TD never happens. And those two aspects of Dart’s play – his ability to read defenses and his ability to maneuver around a dirty pocket while still keeping his eyes downfield – are I believe a large part of what has so many of us excited about him. I have searched and searched and cannot find any PFF discussion anywhere of whether they consider these mental aspects of football, especially at the QB position, in assigning grades. If not, then this is why a PFF grade is only part of the story. Read what former All-Pro Mitchell Schwartz has to say:
The flip side of the story for all quarterbacks is the bad plays. As Schwartz says, turnover avoidance is hugely important, and PFF treats it as such. Dart had two absolutely terrible passes on Sunday. The first came with the Giants up 26-16 and needing to convert a third-and-5 with just under five minutes left at their own 35. Dart is pressured, climbs the pocket, and throws the ball right to Broncos’ linebacker Justin Strnad :
Strnad returned the ball to the 19, and Denver went in shortly thereafter to make the score 26-23. That was one of two turnover-worthy plays they gave Dart. Did it warrant a -2 grade? You could argue that it did. Loft that pass and complete it, and Denver may have to use their final timeout. At the least, you get to run another minute-plus off the clock before punting, still ahead by 10. Given PFF’s grading system, one -2 TWP completely offsets 4 nice but not explosive completed passes that each get a grade of +0.5.
The other TWP was probably the final minute third-and-10 deep pass to Beaux Collins in the end zone that was called defensive pass interference:
I get why Dart did it, but it was third down, there was still the better part of a minute left, and he was very lucky to get the DPI call on what could have been an interception and ended the game right there. We look at it through blue-colored glasses as Giants fans because he did get the DPI call and he snuck in for the TD on the next play to temporarily give the Giants the lead. PFF, though, probably said that the game should have ended right there and gave him another -2. That’s another four nice +0.5 completions wiped out by one bad mistake.
Finally, aside from those two bad plays, Dart went 15-of-33 overall, a 45.5% completion rate. You may have forgotten about all the misses, but he had several crucial overthrows, e.g., one to Wan’Dale Robinson that would have extended a drive after the Broncos began their comeback, and another on a bomb to Jalin Hyatt, who had split two defenders, that would have iced the game had he completed it. Those were surely negatively graded throws: Not -2.0, but probably -1.0 or at best -0.5.
The bottom line:
- I’m still excited about Jaxson Dart. He needs more time in the oven to bake, but he sure does look like he has the right ingredients to make something delicious. He’s gone toe-to-toe with three ostensible playoff teams, all of them with good defenses, and made all of their defenses look silly at times. The Giants with Dart are now appointment viewing across the NFL, something I could not imagine happening.
- It may or may not be permanent. Here’s an interesting, and somewhat troubling, stat:
It’s a small sample, but it does suggest that opponents may be successfully making halftime adjustments to what they see from Dart in the first half when they play the Giants. If so that does not bode well for his playing the Eagles so soon after he played them the first time.
- The right way to look at PFF grades is not to dismiss them out of hand because they do not match your preconceived notion of what you saw. Rather, take them as an opportunity to think about all the plays – not just the great ones you’ve brought forward to the easy-recall part of your brain – and be more aware of the ways in which he (or any player) still needs to improve.
- At the same time, recognize that PFF is not a stand-alone be-all-and-end-all of football analysis. It is one tool that tells us about certain aspects, mainly physical rather than mental, of football. For the mental side of things, there’s no replacement for the experts who can view film knowledgeably and interpret what is or is not going on inside a quarterback’s head. Fortunately, we have a couple of those (but not me) at BBV.
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