West Virginia Mountaineers Pro Football Focus Grades From Kansas

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 Kansas.

This is a free article, but for weeks moving forward, the majority of articles using PFF analytics will be premium articles.

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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:

--After throwing three interceptions inside the red zone it came as no surprise that senior quarterback Will Grier had his poorest graded game by PFF of the season at 60.9. The previous low was against Youngstown State where he was at 71.9.

--Sophomore Tevon Bush graded out as the highest rated player on the team but played only eight snaps. T.J. Simmons was next in line taking his turn a top the wide receiver group.

--Junior right tackle Colton McKivitz was the highest graded offensive lineman, while center Matt Jones was the lowest graded player on the team at 48.2.

--A week after finishing as the top graded player on defense, junior Keith Washington finds himself on the opposite side of things as the lowest on the team.

--His running mate at cornerback Hakeem Bailey had his best game of the season and finished as the top grading player with 84.5 that included stellar marks in coverage.

--Making his first career start at bandit, sophomore Derrek Pitts was one of the most impressive players on the defense finishing second on the team not counting Deamonte Lindsay who only played a total of 10 defensive snaps.

TOTAL:

The West Virginia offense finished with a grade of 68.9

The unit received these grades for each facet.

Passing: 59.6

Pass Blocking: 73.4

Receiving: 70.1

Rushing: 67.7

Run Blocking: 59.0

--It was the worst offensive performance of the season for West Virginia with a season low in passing being the main reason.

The defense took a slight step back at 75.4 from the 79.9 last week but it was still the second best performance of the season for the unit.

The unit received these grades for each facet.

Rush Defense: 76.4

Tackle: 79.0

Pass Rush: 57.7

Defensive Coverage against Receivers: 80.9

--The pass rush marks are the lowest of the season.

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