PFF Trots Out Weak Explanation for Baffling Caleb Williams Week 1 Grade

Here's a dirty little secret about NFL analysts: they're frequently wrong. There's so many players, teams, games, and draft prospects that even the best in the business will make countless predictions or projections that end up being way off. Yours truly confidently said that Colston Loveland was the wrong pick for the Chicago Bears after the 2025 NFL draft. I was way off on that, but not as far off as Pro Football Focus (PFF) was with the grade of Caleb Williams' Week 1 performance.

Despite earning a career-high 94.8 QBR and a 124.1 passer rating against the Carolina Panthers, Williams' Week 1 PFF grade came out to a bewildering 59.3 on Monday, or 21st out of 28 eligible quarterbacks. By Tuesday this had been revised upwards to a 64.6 grade, ranking 17th out of 30. Better, but still befuddling.

When literally every other evaluation metric tells us that Williams was one of the best quarterbacks in Week 1, how can PFF justify placing him and his 59-point performance in the bottom half of quarterbacks? Well, on Tuesday morning, PFF did in fact try to justify their grade, but I'm not buying it.

PFF grading punishes Caleb Williams for the very traits that make him special

In an attempt to explain Caleb Williams' PFF grade, managing editor Mark Chichester released an article to lay out the grading system, how it sees each player in each game, and why that resulted in Williams getting a grade that doesn't match the scoreboard. You can read the whole thing at the link above if you like, but what it boils down to is that Williams was dinged for an allegedly high rate of inaccurate throws that were nevertheless caught by receivers.

PFF judged that Williams only had an accurate throw rate of 53.8%, a catchable but inaccurate rate of 26.9%, and a -6.8 score in accuracy over expectation, good for 24th, 24th, and 25th in the league, respectively. So even though Williams completed 72% of his passes, we still can't say that he was accurate, according to PFF's logic.

Here's the problem with this model: it rewards safe and unspectacular quarterbacking at a disproportionate rate compared to the high-risk, high-reward style of quarterbacking that makes Williams so special.

No, the third-down pass Williams threw while rolling to his left that was caught by a diving Kalif Raymond did not have perfect accuracy. But guess what? Only two other quarterbacks in the league even think about attempting that pass, and they're the former MVP's in Buffalo and Kansas City. The same goes for that 45-yard shot down the sideline to Rome Odunze.

Counting a play that never counted in the game doesn't feel fair

PFF also tried to lean on their base model of grading plays. To explain it briefly, every play is assigned a grade of one of the following: -2, -1.5, -1, -0.5, 0, 0.5, 1, 1.5, or 2, with zero being a play that was exactly as expected. On Williams' 40 dropbacks, only eight were 0.5, while just three were a 1. Conversely, five received a -0.5, but one play that didn't even count got a -1.5, which PFF defines as "inexcusable".

That play was the goal line interception erased by an offsides penalty. First off, it's likely that Williams knew they had a free play on account of the offsides and so took a risk. Second, and for the sake of argument, let's assume it was just a really bad play by Williams. That's fine. He's going to have bad plays. What I have a hard time understanding, however, is how that play earned a -1.5 while this otherworldly touchdown pass to Cole Kmet, featuring pinpoint accuracy to drop the ball between two defenders with textbook anticipation, could not muster up a 1.5 grade.

The Bottom Line

As aforementioned, every other metric tells us that Caleb Williams was fantastic in Week 1. From QBR (94.8) and passer rating (124.1) to Pro Football Network's Impact grade (87.7) we see grades and scores that all seem to confirm the incredible quarterbacking we saw from Williams on Sunday. PFF stands alone on an island insisting that he actually wasn't that good. They can say that his poor grade doesn't mean he played poorly, but what else could it possibly mean when you ranked 16 out of 30 quarterbacks ahead of him?

That alone tells us that their grade isn't truly reflective of Williams' level of play against the Panthers, but the explanation stunk to high heaven, too. In fact, all it did was make PFF's grading system look hopelessly outdated. If it can't separate an off-target checkdown to an uncovered running back five yards away from a 'go up and get it' ball 45 yards downfield, that's a problem.

PFF must find a way to calibrate their grading system to accomodate the truly sensational plays made possible by Williams' uncanny arm talent. Not every throw is going to hit his target in the numbers, but they don't have to. Not when he's making throws that no other quarterback not named Josh Allen or Patrick Mahomes would even dream of attempting.

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