Tru leading the pack

[jjab360]

Mega tron wasnt 100%. Also he burned Tru a couple times and Stafford missed him. All these games. Where Tru is getting all these picks u hardly hear janoris name because the qb doesnt throw his way. Also the last couple games qbs dont throw towards Jenkins usually. Until they were down and rams were playing off coverage. If Tru is #1 cb think we will have problems also we dont know if Gaines will come back same player

Just because QBs aren't throwing his way as much doesn't mean JJ has been better in coverage than Tru.

 

[Ballhawk]

Tru was better than JJ two years ago before his injury and he is better now. No reason to think that Gaines won't come back as good or better than he was either.
I want Jenkins back but not if we lose other players to keep him. If he regresses after getting a new contract we will be left in a bind.

 

[lockdnram21]

Tru was better than JJ two years ago before his injury and he is better now. No reason to think that Gaines won't come back as good or better than he was either.
I want Jenkins back but not if we lose other players to keep him. If he regresses after getting a new contract we will be left in a bind.

Tru is not better then Jenkins not even close. If we loose Jenkins were in trouble. How come its no reason to think Gaines want come back as good. He had a significant injury. Also neither Tru or Gaines can cover #1 receivers and Tru has problem with faster receivers. We will be in trouble if we don't resign Jenkins or get anothr top cb

 

[lockdnram21]

Just because QBs aren't throwing his way as much doesn't mean JJ has been better in coverage than Tru.

To me it is for example. The whole first half of packers game Jenkins was covering James Jones and Rodgers didn't throw his way once. Second half they start moving Jones around and Tru and I think Joyner was covering him then Rodgers start throwing it to him

 

[jjab360]

To me it is for example. The whole first half of packers game Jenkins was covering James Jones and Rodgers didn't throw his way once. Second half they start moving Jones around and Tru and I think Joyner was covering him then Rodgers start throwing it to him

All that means is that the gameplan was to not throw at JJ. Teams are more afraid of him, he's the known asset. That could very well change after the lack of success teams have had throwing at TruJo this year.

 

[The Rammer]

I strongly disagree. Hes getting all those targets because Qbs rarely throw at Jenkins. Jenkins had maybe 1 bad game and that was vs Aj Green

You might disagree but the facts still remain the same. With Jenkins out Tru handles the #1 WR he handles alot better than Jenkins and he doesn't get burned as often for an important 1st down or TD as often as Jenkins.

 

[Ballhawk]

Tru is not better then Jenkins not even close. If we loose Jenkins were in trouble. How come its no reason to think Gaines want come back as good. He had a significant injury. Also neither Tru or Gaines can cover #1 receivers and Tru has problem with faster receivers. We will be in trouble if we don't resign Jenkins or get anothr top cb

Both Tru and Gaines would have been better than JJ last year, this year JJ is blowing fewer coverages because he either is finally getting it or because he has straightened up due to it being a contract year.
He has not been our best CB for the last four years and is the most replaceable player in the secondary to me.
That said, I still want him back to see if he can maintain or improve the level he is currently playing at. He has the raw talent to be a Probowl CB IF he can keep his head in the game.

 

[tempests]

Mega tron wasnt 100%. Also he burned Tru a couple times and Stafford missed him.

Few players are 100% this late into the season. Calvin Johnson got open a few times? That's probably true of every game he's played in his NFL career.

All these games. Where Tru is getting all these picks u hardly hear janoris name because the qb doesnt throw his way.

Seems TJ has only seen a few more targets than Darelle Revis. If there's one guy on this list who's overrated it's Marcus Peters. 8 INT, but 7 TD passes allowed, almost 1000(!) yards on a stunning 132 targets.

 

[lockdnram21]

Both Tru and Gaines would have been better than JJ last year, this year JJ is blowing fewer coverages because he either is finally getting it or because he has straightened up due to it being a contract year.
He has not been our best CB for the last four years and is the most replaceable player in the secondary to me.
That said, I still want him back to see if he can maintain or improve the level he is currently playing at. He has the raw talent to be a Probowl CB IF he can keep his head in the game.

Well this year he's been the best. Tru gets burned without blown coverages . I see what your saying but Tru can't cover #1s like jenkins

 

[Ballhawk]

After today's game I'm not sure that I want either of them back!

 

[ramfan46]

If Jenkins plays hardball, I'd be fine with Gaines and Roberson as replacements. Could always draft a replacement and the money saved could keep Barron. I like Mo, but he ain't Barron. Tru is a must keep IMO. He's very well rounded and makes few fatal errors.

 

[junkman]

Disagree, PFF is the McDonalds of stats, the casual fan eats it up while the more knowledgeable fans know better.

I humbly disagree.

The "casual fan" (like myself) who doesn't watch every single game and likewise does not have a scouting staff at his disposal has no objective basis for comparing players at non-skill positions. Really, who are the best OGs in the league? Who are the best DTs? For most positions, the available stats (tackles, sacks) don't provide a measure of a player's worth. PFF stats (like them or not) are at least consistent from one player and one team to the next, grading every player on every snap, and providing game by game and quantified aggregate results. Are the results perfect and complete? Of course not. But it's a fantastic starting point.

Many journalists also trust PFF. So for discussions like DPOY and DROY, PFF creates a truth, a way of fast forwarding past all the non-specific pontificating homeristic talk ("my guy had a really good year, just dominating all the guys he faced, unblockable by all accounts....") and providing an objective quantified measurement to compare players.

Compare PFF to McDonalds? Perhaps in it's ubiquity, but the implication that the quality is low is dismissive. A better comparison might be standardized testing like the SATs or ACTs. Perfect and complete? Nope. But it's a consistent measure and gets it pretty right for the most part.

So this begs the question, what exactly is it that these "knowledgeable fans" know? And what is the basis for their opinions? If you asked one of these knowledgeable fans to name the top 10 OTs in the league, how would they arrive at this list? "I've seem him play in person" and "I was at this one game..." and "I saw the condensed coaches tape of the game" doesn't really compare to watching and grading every player on every snap, game in, game out.

The more typical thing when listening to "knowledgeable fans" is that they tend to be bi-polar in their opinions which puts them in wild contradiction with each other. "My guy is so much better than your guy. Our team is ranked Xth in this category and it's all because my guy does this and that. Your guy couldn't hold my guy's jock strap. Your guy is a one trick pony that gets lucky from time to time".

PFF brings objectivity and rationality to such conversations.

My limits on PFF? I don't look at PFF to compare the well-analyzed positions. QB, RB, WR, TE... unless we're talking about blocking.

 

[Fatbot]

PFF brings objectivity and rationality to such conversations.

PFF is so far removed from "objective and rational" that it's hard to respond to your post if that's the starting point, but a couple quick responses: The McDonalds comparison is because it's a bad product that is massively consumed way more than it should due to convenience and marketing. It's not "trusted by media" -- it's used by media because they were either paid to start using it, were ordered by their bosses to use it (some of those bosses being self-interested investors in PFF, see Cris Collinsworth), or because the media is lazy and its numbers are easy fast food to point to (only when PFF agrees of course) to make them "look smart". And I think we have a different idea of "knowledgeable fans"... I'm not talking about the blowhards that think they know everything, I mean the people that are knowledgeable enough to know that they don't know.

In a nutshell that's the whole problem with PFF, it pretends it knows something it doesn't. PFF numbers are in reality no more trustworthy than those "knowledgeable fans" you dislike, in many ways much worse than a knowledgeable fan, and in fact PFF is much, much more harmful overall because of this false "air of legitimacy" given to it by its believers.

Watching Eric Reid yesterday was a good reminder of the PFF problem. I don't have the exact PFF numbers, so I may be slightly off, but three years ago PFF graded the rookie Reid among the best safeties in the NFL, and the media rejoiced at how he therefore deserved to make the Pro Bowl, and all Niner fans jerked off in a circle because PFF proved their rookie safety was the best.

Meanwhile, in Indy there was a bad-to-average safety (according to PFF coverage numbers) named Antoine Bethea. He was signed by the 49ers as a free agent. Magically, PFF instantly graded Bethea among the best safeties in the NFL. And once again the media rejoiced at how Bethea deserved to make the Pro Bowl. And Niner fans again jerked off in a circle, of course.

But poor Eric Reid. While Bethea was getting this overnight love, all of the sudden those PFF grades that loved Reid just a year before now suddenly showed he wasn't anything special, or the more diplomatic "took a step backward". He's now an average-to-bad safety according to the magic PFF numbers. So, should we go back and take away Reid's rookie year Pro Bowl because obviously his true talent is now showing? Do we blindly just agree with PFF that Bethea's talent magically switched from bad-to-jeebus because he put on a Whiner jersey?

Or perhaps we should think that the change in personnel, or perhaps injury, affected Reid's individual performance? And perhaps the change in team & scheme affected Bethea's individual performance? Obvious, yet the PFF method cannot account for the most important part of football -- team. PFF can never, ever do what people want to use it for -- objectively measuring individual talent with scientific accuracy.

The problem is casual fans use it exactly for that purpose ("x has a 4.3 grade, y has a 4.2, so I'm right x is better than y and you're wrong!") while the more knowledgeable fans will acknowledge it for nothing more than it is -- a convenient, subjective way to see what players are having a good year under their unique circumstances. Which is something that knowledgeable fans already know without giving money to PFF's snake oil salesmen.

 

[junkman]

PFF is so far removed from "objective and rational" that it's hard to respond to your post if that's the starting point, but a couple quick responses: The McDonalds comparison is because it's a bad product that is massively consumed way more than it should due to convenience and marketing. It's not "trusted by media" -- it's used by media because they were either paid to start using it, were ordered by their bosses to use it (some of those bosses being self-interested investors in PFF, see Cris Collinsworth), or because the media is lazy and its numbers are easy fast food to point to (only when PFF agrees of course) to make them "look smart". And I think we have a different idea of "knowledgeable fans"... I'm not talking about the blowhards that think they know everything, I mean the people that are knowledgeable enough to know that they don't know.

In a nutshell that's the whole problem with PFF, it pretends it knows something it doesn't. PFF numbers are in reality no more trustworthy than those "knowledgeable fans" you dislike, in many ways much worse than a knowledgeable fan, and in fact PFF is much, much more harmful overall because of this false "air of legitimacy" given to it by its believers.

Watching Eric Reid yesterday was a good reminder of the PFF problem. I don't have the exact PFF numbers, so I may be slightly off, but three years ago PFF graded the rookie Reid among the best safeties in the NFL, and the media rejoiced at how he therefore deserved to make the Pro Bowl, and all Niner fans jerked off in a circle because PFF proved their rookie safety was the best.

Meanwhile, in Indy there was a bad-to-average safety (according to PFF coverage numbers) named Antoine Bethea. He was signed by the 49ers as a free agent. Magically, PFF instantly graded Bethea among the best safeties in the NFL. And once again the media rejoiced at how Bethea deserved to make the Pro Bowl. And Niner fans again jerked off in a circle, of course.

But poor Eric Reid. While Bethea was getting this overnight love, all of the sudden those PFF grades that loved Reid just a year before now suddenly showed he wasn't anything special, or the more diplomatic "took a step backward". He's now an average-to-bad safety according to the magic PFF numbers. So, should we go back and take away Reid's rookie year Pro Bowl because obviously his true talent is now showing? Do we blindly just agree with PFF that Bethea's talent magically switched from bad-to-jeebus because he put on a Whiner jersey?

Or perhaps we should think that the change in personnel, or perhaps injury, affected Reid's individual performance? And perhaps the change in team & scheme affected Bethea's individual performance? Obvious, yet the PFF method cannot account for the most important part of football -- team. PFF can never, ever do what people want to use it for -- objectively measuring individual talent with scientific accuracy.

The problem is casual fans use it exactly for that purpose ("x has a 4.3 grade, y has a 4.2, so I'm right x is better than y and you're wrong!") while the more knowledgeable fans will acknowledge it for nothing more than it is -- a convenient, subjective way to see what players are having a good year under their unique circumstances. Which is something that knowledgeable fans already know without giving money to PFF's snake oil salesmen.

So I get it, you don't like PFF. Some counterpoint:

• Objective? Name a more objective source that rates every player every position. How does this more objective source rate, I dunno, offensive guards in both run blocking and pass blocking. Who does this objective source consider the top 20 offensive guards to be this year? If this really is an objective source, I bet it would match pretty closely with PFF.
• Re: Reid and Bethea and 49ers and pro bowls and all that, yeah, players magically improve or crash overnight. Usually it's because there is a better scheme fit as with the Rams and Barron for instance. Barron is playing well for the Rams. He wasn't playing well for the Bucs. Courtland Finegan started sucking overnight mid-season with the Rams. It happens. You don't need to read anything more into it than that.
• Re: Casual fans mis-using it, well, casual fans misuse any number of stats. People will argue that Emmitt Smith running behind the Dallas OL with tons of complementary talent is better than Barry Sanders just because Smith had more career rushing yards and Super Bowl titles. (those people are wrong) Nobody claims that PFF or any stat is the be-all-end-all of stats. If they do, they are mis-using it. That doesn't make PFF wrong or worthless any more than it makes all stats worthless.
• Blowhards vs knowledgeable fans, who is it that anoints people into one category vs the other? When you wind up in a disagreement and you are worlds apart, PFF is a good source to mediate. E.g. "Greg Robinson has played great all year!" "Nonsense, he's a sieve and lunges too much". "Did you see that one block against..." That argument built on limited observation and anecdotes ends when someone points to his PFF grade of 30.1 which puts him as the #77 of 82 Ts. He's had a bad year, but has been better last few weeks.

This will likely become one of those agree to disagree discussions, but I encourage you to think in an open minded manner about the positives that PFF brings to the table, and not be so eager to dismiss it. Or at least not without pointing to a standard you like better.

 

[Fatbot]

Nobody claims that PFF or any stat is the be-all-end-all of stats. If they do, they are mis-using it. ... argument built on limited observation and anecdotes ends when someone points to his PFF grade of 30.1 which puts him as the #77 of 82 Ts.

Agree, I do not want to beat a dead horse here, and I agree with your notion that for people that understand what the PFF numbers really signify, it's not evil at all, just another tool for analysis. But see the above quote, it illustrates how easy it is to misuse it. Even you slip in that because PFF says GRob is "#77 of 82" that is the end-all, be-all end to any discussion of him! So you say that people aren't using it as the end-all, be-all stat, but in fact that's EXACTLY what many are doing -- especially troublesome is that many of the media are guilty -- and that's just wrong.