Pro Football Focus’ grades have become one of the most commonly cited metrics in NFL analysis. They’re an easy catch-all number to quantify how “good” a player is.
PFF grades are especially appealing because of how nuanced football can be compared to other sports. Unlike a sport like baseball, where just about everything that happens is trackable in the box score, many of the critical events during a football game are not tracked by the box score. A great block, a great rep in coverage to force the quarterback to continue through his read, a perfect pass dropped by the receiver—the box score does not account for any of these things.
That’s why PFF grades have gained so much steam in the NFL world. They are calculated manually by humans who grade each play using the eye test, thereby accounting for these overlooked factors. Thus, the grades can feel like a much more accurate encapsulation of a player’s true impact than any box-score stat could be.
PFF grades aren’t without their share of warts, though. It would be naive to pretend it is an impeccable metric that should be viewed as gospel. The grades are a useful tool, but their limitations can make them unreliable.
The first concern is the qualifications of the people doing the grades. These certainly aren’t former NFL head coaches.
Here is how the company itself explains the qualifications of its graders.
“PFF employs over 600 full or part-time analysts, but less than 10% of analysts are trained to the level that they can grade plays. Only the top two to three percent of analysts are on the team of ‘senior analysts’ in charge of finalizing each grade after review. Our graders have been training for months, and sometimes years, in order to learn, understand and show mastery of our process that includes our 300-page training manual and video playbook. We have analysts from all walks of life, including former players, coaches and scouts. We don’t care if you played.
“Each grade is reviewed at least once, and usually multiple times, using every camera angle available, including All-22 coaches’ tape.”
That doesn’t do much to qualm concerns.
Many football coaches would tell you that nobody is qualified to grade a player’s performance on a play unless they are part of the coaching staff that knows what the player’s responsibility was and how he was taught to execute it in practice, even if they are a Hall-of-Fame coach or player. Certainly, that isn’t the case at PFF, so that will always be an issue.
There will surely be many instances in each game where a player is inaccurately credited or knocked because the people grading the play could not know the player’s assignment unless they were in the room. So, even if the graders were clones of Bill Belichick, it would still be difficult to fully trust the grades, because Belichick couldn’t tell you how a player was taught or what his assignment was unless he was at practice that week.
But when you add in the fact that the site openly relies on graders who may not have even played the game, it further calls the validity of the grades into question. That’s not to say that people who never played should not be allowed to talk about or analyze the game on a large platform, but it’s a whole different animal when they’re producing grades that will be cited by millions of people across the globe to quantify how well a man does his job. These grades are not being peddled as opinions.
There is also the question of the attention paid to each play. Each week, thousands upon thousands of college and NFL players have their grades posted the following morning. Many of those players log upwards of 60-70 snaps, which means there are, cumulatively, hundreds of thousands of plays for PFF to grade each week.
How thoroughly could each play have been graded if the grades are being posted less than 24 hours later?
Suffice to say, there are enough concerns about PFF grades for them to be reduced to a useful tool that deserves consideration, but not the be-all and the end-all to any conversation about a player’s performance.
With all of that said, which Jets players have the most misleading PFF grades, for better or worse?
Most overrated: LB Jamien Sherwood
Jamien Sherwood was one of the Jets’ most maligned players of the 2025 season.
Expectations were high for Sherwood, a freshly minted team captain who signed a three-year, $45 million extension. He was coming off a legitimately excellent 2024 season in which he tied for fourth among linebackers in defensive stops (59) and allowed no touchdowns in coverage across 558 coverage snaps.
In 2025, though, Sherwood struggled to the point that he was benched for the first half of the team’s Week 8 game against the Bengals. He returned to his every-down starting role for the rest of the season, but Sherwood’s struggled were evident throughout the entire year.
Poor effort, poor tackling, and poor coverage were everywhere on Sherwood’s film. Yet, somehow, PFF gave him a respectable 65.7 grade, good enough for 29th out of 67 qualified linebackers. That was a drop-off from his 10th-ranked 73.8 in 2024, but it does not accurately capture how poor Sherwood looked.
Most underrated: EDGE Will McDonald
Will McDonald’s overall PFF grade was just 59.2 in 2025, ranking 53rd among the 64 edge rushers to play at least 500 snaps. It makes him seem like a low-end starter on the edge.
That number does not do enough justice to his pass rushing skills, especially since PFF grades are supposed to account for context.
While McDonald remains a liability against the run, his play in that phase shouldn’t drag his overall grade down that much. Just 38% of his snaps in 2025 came on run plays, so he was only playing the run on fewer than four out of every 10 plays, anyway. The majority of his grade should come from pass rushing, and in that phase, he is a dangerous player.
In the box score, McDonald’s pass rush impact declined compared to the 2024 season. He dropped from 10.5 sacks and 61 total pressures to 8.0 sacks and 42 total pressures, although he played two fewer games.
On film, though, McDonald was winning his pass-rush reps at a much better rate than his cumulative statistics let on. He just didn’t get the chance to turn it into production because the Jets’ terrible coverage was allowing quarterbacks to get the ball out so quickly.
The numbers back it up, too. The Jets’ opponents averaged 2.59 seconds to throw in 2025, tied for the fastest mark in the NFL. This is something that PFF grades should account for, especially since it is backed up by the film.
Considering the primary responsibilities of McDonald’s role, the eye test does not show a player who should be ranked outside the top 50 starting edge rushers.
Sherwood and McDonald are two examples of players who demonstrate that fans and analysts should never settle on a PFF grade to tell the whole story without digging deeper into the player’s film, his other advanced metrics, and the context of his situation. The grades are just one factor in a complex equation.
