On Monday, Pro Football Focus writer Zoltán Buday published a ranking of the NFL’s top 32 safeties for 2024.
Antoine Winfield of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers led the list, followed by Kyle Hamilton of the Baltimore Ravens, Jessie Bates of the Atlanta Falcons, Minkah Fitzpatrick of the Pittsburgh Steelers and Marcus Williams of the Ravens.
At this point, we would normally share the name of the Kansas City Chiefs safety who made the list — but there wasn’t one.
Are you surprised? I was.
This list is a good example of something that has always bugged me about PFF grades.
The organization wants us to consider its calculations as a valid way to compare players at a position — but when a PFF analyst publishes a position ranking, these grades usually seem to take a back seat to the writer’s opinion.
On one level, this is perfectly all right. Rankings made by writers from other outlets also reflect their individual opinions. These are not always based on measurable data points.
It’s reasonable, however, to expect a service whose purpose is to provide proprietary grades for NFL players to insist that its writers would use them as the primary basis for their rankings. But as this list shows, they do not. At the very least, they fail to evaluate their data reasonably and consistently.
For example:
Vonn Bell of the Bengals ranks 32nd on Buday’s list — yet his grade is 44th among safeties who played at least 50% of the defensive snaps in 2023. The writer admits that PFF rates Bell’s 2023 season with the Carolina Panthers as the worst of his career. But Buday is confident he’ll be better this season.
“Bell now returns to Cincinnati,” he writes, “after ranking among the top 35 safeties in all three of his previous seasons with the Bengals.”
Perhaps it should be noted that Bell is among three Cincinnati safeties (including second-year player Jordan Battle at 29th and Geno Stone at 20th) who are ranked among the top 32.
Buday ranked the Jacksonville Jaguars’ Darnell Savage 31st.
“Savage revived his career in his last season in Green Bay,” wrote Buday, “as his 75.5 overall grade was a career-high mark and ranked 15th at the position.”
But a closer look reveals that this was only because of one spectacular game in the postseason. During the regular season, Savage’s 66.3 grade ranked 54th among safeties with at least 20% of the snaps; he wasn’t even among the 61 players who were in for at least half the snaps. So this would be like saying Kansas City’s Deon Bush (who played 18% of 2023’s defensive snaps) deserves to be among the league’s top 32 safeties because of his terrific performance against the Ravens in the AFC Championship.
Speaking of Kansas City players… why isn’t Justin Reid included in this ranking? Among starting safeties (those who played 80% of the snaps in 2023), Reid’s regular-season PFF grade of 57.7 ranks 23rd. At the 50% cutoff, Reid ranks 53rd. So by PFF’s standards, it’s a stretch for him to be on this list.
But according to Pro Football Reference (among players with at least 50% of the 2023 snaps), Reid allowed a passer rating of 89.7 when targeted (ranking 23rd), a completion percentage of 62.9 (14th), made 95 total tackles (16th) and had a missed tackle percentage of 6.9 (20th).
I’m not claiming that Reid is one of the league’s best safeties — but in his case, it sure seems like his PFF grades could be missing something.
This exercise (once again) shows us that while PFF grades are a useful data point, they probably shouldn’t be considered the final word in player evaluation.
After all… not even their writers see them that way.
