Cal Football: PFF Rates Mitchell Schwartz as NFL's No. 1 Offensive Tackle

It’s been a spectacular year in the football life of Mitchell Schwartz.

The 31-year-old former Cal star started every game last season for the eighth straight time in his NFL career, and ended the 2019 campaign as a Super Bowl champion with the Kansas City Chiefs.

In the offseason, while battling the restrictions of COVID-19, the 6-foot-5, 317-pound offensive tackle kept in touch with fans by creating his “Mitch in the Kitch” online cooking show.

Fast forward to the 2020 pre-season rankings, and Schwartz inexplicably fell off the NFL planet.

Within weeks this summer, both the NFL Network and ESPN ignored Schwartz in their rankings of elite players.

Schwartz was nowhere in the NFL Network’s rankings of the top-100 players.

And in ESPN’s annual ratings of the top-10 players at 11 different positions in a poll of 50 executives, coaches, scouts and players, Schwartz was no longer regarded as a top-10 tackle.

Well, Pro Football Focus disagrees.

Anthony Treash of the football analytics site has ranked Schwartz as the No. 1 offensive tackle in the game. Schwartz played 1,046 snaps last season, incurred just five penalties and allowed no sacks.

Here’s what Treash said about Schwartz:

WAR refers to wins above replacement, and the PFF model rates these categories, in order:

— Determine how good a given player was during a period of time (generally a season) using PFF grades;

— Map a player’s production to a “wins” value for his team using the relative importance of each facet of play;

— Simulate a team’s expected performance with a player of interest and with an average player participating identically in his place. Take the difference in expected wins (e.g., Wins Above Average);

— Determine the average player with a given participation profile’s wins above replacement player, assuming a team of replacement-level players is a 3-13 team;

— Add the terms in the last two calculations to get that player’s WAR.

The rest of Treash's top-5 featured Ryan Ramczyk of the New Orleans Saints, David Bakhtiari of the Green Bay Packers, Ronnie Stanley of the Baltimore Ravens and Terron Armstead of the New Orleans Saints.

PFF's rankings are in stark contrast to the earlier omissions, but It seems unlikely that Schwartz has lost any sleep over those. Here's this from Mitchell's brother Geoff, a former nine-year NFL pro with five NFL teams:

Schwartz was named to the All-Pro second team in 2019 a year after earning first-team honors. He also was a second-team choice in 2015, '16 and '17. Schwartz has started all 128 games of his eight-year NFL career with the Cleveland Browns or the Chiefs.

Schwartz wrote on Instagram this summer that he and his wife Brooke have decided Kansas City will be their home even after he eventually retires.

“KC felt like home when we first moved here, and now it’s going to be home forever!” Schwartz wrote. “We’re so excited to settle down here long term and continue being a part of the KC community!”

*** The Kansas City Chiefs are the preseason favorites to win the Super Bowl again, but they'll have to buck history to do it:

Follow Jeff Faraudo of Cal Sports Report on Twitter: @jefffaraudo

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