To the average fan and media member, it’s a pretty easy process to watch a football game on a Saturday afternoon and determine who played well, and who didn’t. Each week after the Oregon Ducks play, we put out our articles on whose stock rose or fell the most and offer a report card for the various positions on the team. It’s not a hard exercise but takes some time and attention to detail.
When you get into specific grades for each individual player, though, it becomes a massive undertaking. Fortunately for all of us football fans, we can lean on Pro Football Focus to give an assessment of how each player performed in a game, breaking stats up between run plays and pass plays, and giving grades for each. They also look at targets, missed tackles, pressure opportunities, and much, much more.
We wanted to take these grades and see if we could glean any information from it all. How did the Ducks look against the Washington State Cougars on an individual basis?
Here are the top-10 players on the team in that game, according to PFF’s grades.