How did Jaxson Dart get a mediocre PFF grade in the Cowboys game?
Jaxson Dart | IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connectquixotic - hopelessly impractical especially in the pursuit of ideals (Merriam-Webster)
Shortly after I joined the BBV staff as a weekly contributor in 2022, Ed asked me if I'd be willing to write the weekly post on Pro Football Focus grades after each New York Giants game. It's a somewhat thankless task, though I find it personally educational to try to figure out why they gave a player the grade they did.
I've tried over the years to explain what I know about how PFF grades and how they are determined, and I've even published a couple of pieces specifically on that topic. Judging by the reactions to my last piece after the Dallas game, none of it has had much effect. Many of you were incensed in particular that Jaxson Dart only received a PFF passing grade of 68.5, which is in the 60-70 range of grades that PFF regards as average, or expected, play. That for a night when he went 23-of-29 (79.3%) for 230 yards, 3 TDs, and no interceptions. I'm sure that Giants fans will take a stat line like that every week of the season. PFF looked at it and said, at the upper end of average."
In general, you don't want to know the details of how the sausage is made, but when you don't like the taste of the final product, peeking behind the curtain can be a useful thing. PFF does give us some peeks behind the curtain. Generally, they emphasize that they grade process, not results. That makes sense for several reasons. Think of the two most recent unforgettable passing plays in Giants history:
In the 2008 Super Bowl, Eli Manning made perhaps the most famous pass in Super Bowl history, hitting David Tyree deep downfield, the latter making the famous helmet catch," which kept the game-winning drive alive and led to spoiling the Patriots' perfect season. I don't know how PFF graded that throw. I do know that they credited Manning with one turnover-worthy play" (TWP) in that game; that pass might or might not have been it. Manning heroically escaped pressure on that play to get the pass off, but let's face it, he just put it up for grabs. If not for Tyree's superhuman effort, Rodney Harrison might have intercepted that ball and it would have been lights out for the Giants.
Four years later the Giants were in a similar situation, needing a TD to beat the Patriots in the Super Bowl. This time, it was the Manning-to-Manningham pass play that became part of history. Manning-to-Manningham had everything: Crucial situation, explosive pass play, unbelievable accuracy of ball placement in-bounds but between two defenders, plus an absolutely great catch by Manningham. We know that that pass received a grade of +2 from PFF, the highest grade it's possible for them to give, because they used it to explain what a +2 grade is (https://www.pff.com/grades).
All well and good, but it's all the -1, -0.5, 0, +0.5, and +1 grades that make up most of a football game. This week PFF apparently noticed that Chicago Bears fans were mildly upset, to say the least, that their QB, Caleb Williams, received a passing grade of 64.0 after his 21-for-29, 269 yards, 2 TDs, and 0 INTs performance in a 59-37 win over Carolina. Pretty similar to Dart's stat line, and a pretty similar PFF grade.
At the heart of PFF's grading system is an assumption that an NFL player shouldn't get credit for the basic things he is supposed to do. If you're a starting quarterback in the NFL you're expected to complete easy passes. No participation trophy. If you go 20-for-20 and everything is a short pass where the receiver is wide open, they're not impressed. It's like not being impressed if the mailman shows up every day and actually puts the mail in the mailbox. The question they ask is: Don't tell me about the result - how good was the process that led to that result? In the case of Williams, he dropped back 40 times, and 23 of those times he got a grade of 0. He had one terrible play for which he got a -1.5, 8 plays with a grade of +0.5, and 1 play with a grade of +1. No +1.5 or +2 plays. That's how you wind up with an average overall grade.
But you don't care about Caleb Williams, you care about Dart. Fortunately the article gives us a peek - but only a peek - at how they viewed what Dart did on Sunday:
Willams was only 12th-highest in positively graded plays. Trevor Lawrence and Lamar Jackson were the two highest. Sitting there at No. 3, though, is Jaxson Dart, who achieved a positive grade on 32.35% of his dropbacks.
They also show us their rankings for negatively graded plays:
Dart comes in sixth-lowest on this list. So put those two things together - third-highest in positively graded dropbacks and sixth-lowest in negatively graded dropbacks - and I think the result matches what most of you - and I - thought of Dart's performance. Lots of good reps, not many bad reps.
If PFF stopped there, I suspect that we'd all be pretty happy with it. But they don't stop there. Positively graded plays go from +0.5 (nice) to +2 (wow!). Negatively graded plays go from -0.5 (oops) to -2 (omigod, what were you thinking?). The two extremes are what they refer to as big-time throws" (BTT) and turnover-worthy plays" (TWP). Both of those may or may not show up on the stat sheet. If Dart throws a beautiful pass deep downfield and the receiver drops it, it's 0-for-1 on the stat sheet but it's a BTT nonetheless to PFF because Dart went above and beyond what you expect of an average QB. Likewise if he throws the ball right into the midsection of a defensive back and the defender drops it, it's 0-for-1 on the stat sheet but a TWP nonethless to PFF, i.e., the fact that the defender was inept doesn't absolve the QB of his terrible throw. I don't know how they exactly do the math to come up with the final grade, but those are the factors that go into it.
They only show the detailed analysis for Williams, but they make it available for every other QB as well...for a $199.99 PFF Pro" subscription. I don't have that. So I'm going to try to guess at how they reacted to every Dart dropback from the film and compare it to what they actually said. The grades below are my guesses after watching the film. Remember, nothing wrong with a zero, it's just an as expected for an NFL QB" result.
First Quarter:
10:49: Dart to Nabers, 9 yards (grade = 0)
9:43: Dart short to Ricard, incomplete, deflected (grade = -0.5)
7:32: Dart to Likely, 13 yards (grade = 0)
0:33: Dart incomplete to Nabers, almost intercepted (grade = -1)
0:29: Dart to Likely, 7 yards (grade = 0)
Second Quarter:
14:13: Dart to Nabers, 7 yards (grade = 0)
5:01: Dart pulls it down, scrambles forward, sack but no yards lost (grade = -0.5)
4:19: Dart incomplete long to Fields, almost sacked (grade = 0)
4:14: Dart pressured, pass to Likely, 19 yards (grade = +1.5)
3:01: Dart short to Fields, 19 yards (grade = +0.5)
2:36: Dart sacked, -8 yards, fumbles, Runyan recovers (-2)
0:49: Dart to Nabers, incomplete (grade = 0)
0:45: Dart to Fields, 6 yards (grade = +0.5)
0:40: Dart to Nabers, 16 yards (grade = +0.5)
0:35: Dart to Mooney, 18 yards (grade = +1)
0:31: Dart to Likely, 5 yards (grade = 0)
0:20: Dart to Likely, 15 yards, TD (grade = +0.5)
Third quarter:
13:41: Dart to Johnson, 9 yards (grade = 0)
11:25: Dart to Nabers, 16 yards (grade = 0)
9:55: Dart to Mooney, 9 yards (grade = 0)
8:28: Dart to Nabers, 13 yards (grade = +0.5)
6:59: Dart to Likely, 2 yards, TD (grade = 0)
Fourth quarter:
12:10: Dart to Fields deep, incomplete (grade = -0.50)
11:16: Dart to Singletary, loss of 7 yards (grade = -1)
10:27: Dart to Nabers, 7 yards (grade = 0)
9:43: Dart to Singletary, 13 yards (grade = 0)
8:16: Dart to Singletary, 7 yards (grade = 0)
7:26: Dart to Singletary, 7 yards, TD (grade = 0)
4:34: Dart downfield to Nabers, incomplete (grade = -1)
4:30: Dart to Likely, 12 yards (grade = +0.5)
2:16: Dart to Likely, 5 yards (grade = +1)
OK, so how did I do? PFF said:
Positively graded plays: 32.35% of 34 dropbacks = 11 plays
My score: 9 plays
Negatively graded plays: 11.76% of 34 dropbacks = four plays
My score: 7 plays
In other words, PFF was more generous than I was in giving Dart credit for his throws in this game. I didn't expect that, but so be it. The bottom line, which is the point of this post, is that their view of Dart's performance against Dallas was not more critical of him than mine was. Why, then, the middling 68.5 PFF passing grade?
It's primarily, I'm sure, because PFF values explosive plays. Ever since the Tom Brady era began, teams have been getting to and winning Super Bowls because of intermediate and deep completed passes. Teams like the 2013 Seattle Seahawks and 2015 Denver Broncos who won mainly on the basis of defense and a strong ground game have mostly been absent since then. The Giants under Dart haven't really been that (yet). It may come in time, as Dart becomes more comfortable with Nabers, Fields, Mooney, and Odell Beckham, but for now, they are more a "matriculate down the field" type of team.
As we can see from my attempt to grade Dart's throws vs. PFF's, PFF doesn't seem to be judging Dart too harshly on whether he's making enough good throws or not. It's just because when you have a spray chart that looks like this:
With only two pass attempts and one completion more than 20 yards past the line of scrimmage, you're not going to see them giving Dart a high PFF passing grade.
You may disagree that explosive plays and interceptions are important to winning and losing. Three yards and a cloud of dust was a thing when I was a kid and those didn't matter so much. It may be quixotic of me to imagine that any amount of writing can change the way many of you look at PFF grades. I might even suggest to PFF that they could quiet some of the outrage against them by making positively and negatively graded throw percentage a standard stat they present every week. It seems that assessing +/- throws is not their problem. The problem instead seems to be getting from that to the PFF grades that we all see, which is fairly opaque.
The bottom line is that PFF in fact seems to be seeing pretty much the same thing that we all see...they are just valuing it differently. In some sense, the blame should go to Matt Nagy and Brian Callahan. If they're designing an offense that can sustain drives and put points on the board with mostly short and intermediate pass routes that spring receivers open, who needs explosive plays? The counter-argument is that a 10-play drive has more chances to mess up and turn the ball over than a 1-play, 80-yard bomb for a TD. But the counter-counter-argument is that keeping the ball out of Dak Prescott's hands and wearing down the opposing defense is a good game plan. You choose.
An example of another composite score for quarterbacks that gives a different result is Pro Football Sports Network's Impact Grade." Impact Grade is similar to other football metrics and different from PFF's grade in that it is based on results, not process. It doesn't care whether a throw was difficult or easy, well thrown or lucky not to be intercepted, etc., as PFF's grade does. It just measures what was accomplished, with a nod toward game situation so that just piling up meaningless yards is not rewarded. Impact Score uses different metrics for different positions. For QB, its metrics are
The Impact Grade starts with 75 as a normal" score and goes up or down from there based on individual stats. For Week 1 their ranking of QBs is
That ranking will be more to the liking of BBV readers. It agrees to some extent with the PFF grades: PFSN's top QB for Week 1, Trevor Lawrence, was PFF's No. 2. Their No. 4, Lamar Jackson, was PFF's No. 9. (Note, though, that the PFSN impact grade includes QB runs. The PFF grades I analyzed were just for passing. PFF also gives a QB rushing grade, and for that, Lamar was No. 1 at 81.0 and Dart No. 3 at 78.1. In total offense, which includes both, Dart's overall PFF grade of 74.3 was 11th.)
In the end, there is probably value in noting both results and the process used to get those results. For me at least, the more metrics, the better I feel I can understand what a player is bringing to the table. The bottom line: Just win, baby.