West Virginia Mountaineers Football Pro Football Focus Grades from Week One

WVSports.com is excited to announce that the Rivals network has teamed up with Pro Football Focus, the go-to site for player grades and advanced analytics in both college football and the NFL. We will incorporate PFF data into stories regularly going forward, and one thing you can look forward to each week is a grade for all of West Virginia's players from the previous game.

In this article, we use the PFF grades to show you how the Mountaineers performed against Tennessee. This is a free article, but for weeks moving forward, the majority of articles using PFF analytics will be premium articles.

This is the best time to sign up for a WVSports.com subscription! You will not want to miss out on the new content that we will be producing!

But first an explanation on the grades from PFF.

On every play, a PFF analyst will grade each player on a scale of -2 to +2 according to what he did on the play.

At one end of the scale you have a catastrophic game-ending interception or pick-six from a quarterback, and at the other a perfect deep bomb into a tight window in a critical game situation, with the middle of that scale being 0-graded, or ‘expected’ plays that are neither positive nor negative.

Each game is also graded by a second PFF analyst independent of the first, and those grades are compared by a third, Senior Analyst, who rules on any differences between the two. These grades are verified by the Pro Coach Network, a group of former and current NFL coaches with over 700 combined years of NFL coaching experience, to get them as accurate as they can be.

From there, the grades are normalized to better account for game situation; this ranges from where a player lined up to the dropback depth of the quarterback or the length of time he had the ball in his hand and everything in between. They are finally converted to a 0-100 scale and appear in our Player Grades Tool.

Season-level grades aren’t simply an average of every game-grade a player compiles over a season, but rather factor in the duration at which a player performed at that level. Achieving a grade of 90.0 in a game once is impressive, doing it (12) times in a row is more impressive.

It is entirely possible that a player will have a season grade higher than any individual single-game grade he achieved, because playing well for an extended period of time is harder to do than for a short period, Similarly, playing badly for a long time is a greater problem than playing badly once, so the grade can also be compounded negatively.

Each week, grades are subject to change while we run through our extensive review process including All-22 tape runs and coaching audit, so you may notice discrepancies among grades published in earlier articles compared with those in the Player Grades tool until grade lock each week.

OFFENSE:

It should come as no surprise that Will Grier is the highest rated player on the West Virginia football team after a career high performance throwing for 429 yards and five touchdowns with zero turnovers.

DEFENSE:

TOTAL:

The West Virginia offense finished with a grade of 82.8, good for 13th nationally.

The unit received these grades for each facet.

Passing: 93.4

Pass Blocking: 76.3

Receiving: 80.0

Rushing: 57.5

Run Blocking: 58.5

--It came as no surprise that the Mountaineers received excellent marks when the ball was in the air and the rushing aspect has room to improve.

The Mountaineers received a 66.3 grade on the defensive side placing the group 115th nationally despite only allowing 301 yards and 14 points.

Rush Defense: 61.2

Tackle: 52.2

Pass Rusher: 66.4

Defensive Coverage against Receivers: 67.7

Special teams ranked at 60.4

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