West Virginia Mountaineers Pro Football Focus Grades From Texas Tech

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 Texas Tech.

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:

--Another game, another top performance for senior quarterback Will Grier who completed 27-41 for 370 yards and 3 scores.

--A surprise at the bottom as senior WR David Sills received the lowest grade at 45.8 receiving a low grade in the passing department.

---Another career game for junior Marcus Simms who hauled in 9 passes for 138 yards and a touchdown earning him the second highest grade on the team.

DEFENSE:

---Redshirt junior Keith Washington played 82 total snaps and made the most of it recording seven tackles, three pass breakups and a pick six. He was the highest grader on the unit.

--Senior defensive lineman Kenny Bigelow wasn't far behind at 81.9 faring particuarly well in rush defense.

--Sophomore Kenny Robinson recorded two interceptions and that netted him at 81.8.

TOTAL:

The West Virginia offense finished with a grade of 80.2

The unit received these grades for each facet.

Passing: 92.3

Pass Blocking: 73.7

Receiving: 68.7

Rushing: 74.2

Run Blocking: 63.2

--The passing numbers are the second highest of the season.

The defense improved for the third straight week with its highest grade of the year at 79.6

The unit received these grades for each facet.

Rush Defense: 83.5

Tackle: 60.1

Pass Rush: 65.8

Defensive Coverage against Receivers: 80.8

--The coverage marks are a season high for the unit.

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