West Virginia Mountaineers Pro Football Focus Grades From Kansas State

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 State.

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!

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 comes as no surprise that the top two graded players were senior quarterback Will Grier (90.4) and senior wide receiver David Sills (85.6). Grier misfired on only 10 passes while throwing for five touchdowns for the fifth time in his career, three of those going to Sills who also set a career-mark for receptions in a game with 10.

--The tackles again were at the top of the board for offensive linemen led for the second week in a row by fifth year senior Yodny Cajuste. He graded out well in both pass blocking (76.3) and run blocking (76.2) and allowed only one quarterback pressure. McKivitz graded out higher in pass blocking at 83.2 and did not allow a pressure.

--After being the highest graded player against Youngstown State, freshmen Leddie Brown was graded at 47.1 with 20 yards but 13 of those came after contact.

DEFENSE:

--Junior David Long recorded 9 tackles, 2 sacks and a forced fumble and finished as the highest graded player for the first time this season according to PFF. His running mate, sophomore Dylan Tonkery, rebounded from being the lowest graded player against Youngstown State with zero tackles to the second highest that played over ten snaps.

--No defensive lineman played over 38 snaps in this game.

--In his second start, junior SAM JoVanni Stewart graded out almost identical to his first game with good marks in run defense but low marks in coverage.

TOTAL:

The West Virginia offense finished with a grade of 79.8

The unit received these grades for each facet.

Passing: 89.3

Pass Blocking: 70.5

Receiving: 72.9

Rushing: 57.0

Run Blocking: 74.0

--The passing numbers are similar to the first two weeks but rushing took a dive after being 83.5 against Youngstown State.

The defense improved for the third straight week with its highest grade of the year at 71.0.

The unit received these grades for each facet.

Rush Defense: 82.4

Tackle: 80.4

Pass Rush: 59.8

Defensive Coverage against Receivers: 63.1

--The run defense and tackling were the highest of the season by a significant margin.

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