The Scramble

This being Friday of Super Bowl Week, you’ve surely encountered a healthy dose of matchups, breakdowns, and backstories for the two teams and their players by now. The necessary paces of proper previewing dictate certain topics get covered, and the customary angles get addressed, but that’s all a bit too rigid for the Scramble.

Instead of tacking on more about the head-to-head, this-guy-or-that battles (tough to add to what our analysis team has produced this week anyway), our four Scramblers were set loose to explore the fringes of this week’s big game. Free to trek down whatever random path caught their interest, they’ve returned to assemble a piece that’ll take you in four directions and round out your pregame prep.

So, as the meat marinates, the beverages chill, and the guacamole awaits its first chip, have a read and join in on the conversation in the comments section below.   Read the rest of this entry »

The Scramble assignment this week was simple: explore the NFL’s Final Four through a PFF Signature Stats lens.

With our ever-growing list of unique statistics, it was a enlightening task to sift through and uncover those that shone most on these remaining squads. Each of our Scramblers adopted a team for the week, went to work, and what they’ll present below is a brief look at the Conference Championship teams like you’ll find nowhere else, built purely from our database.

It’s a little more number-heavy than usual and surely holds a different angle or two than standard coverage may bring. You can find all we discuss here and a ton more in our PFF Premium Stats.

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After a week off to wrap up some end-of-season chores, the Scramble returns to take on another assignment. This time around we’ve directed our efforts toward the upcoming Divisional Round games and took some time to reduce each team to a simple set of strengths and weaknesses (with aid from PFF’s lead analyst, Ben Stockwell). Given how those weak points are magnified come this time of year, our focus landed squarely there.

So much has been floated about Tim Tebow’s un-quarterback-like qualities and how they’ll eventually sting the surprising Broncos, there was no need for us to pursue that any further. Likewise, San Francisco’s red zone issues were spelled-out perfectly in Sam Monson’s article on Thursday, so we took another tack.

Each team that remains now is here for a reason, but none of them are perfectly dominant. The NFL’s “Elite Eight” (if you will) for this season are flawed and here you’ll see our four Scramblers find fragile points that could bring down a pair of favorites or hold down a couple of underdogs.

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The arrival of the regular season’s final week stirs thoughts of how fast it’s all gone by and flashes of the twists the past four months have given us. With playoff scenarios mapped out and a majority of the slots filled, a step back to consider how we’ve got to this point provides some broad perspective, bringing into view key moments that have shaped the 2011 season.

A hot start ends, a dominant mid-season run takes form, a late fade rips away hope … all of these story lines can be boiled down to important moments that triggered change. This week’s Scramble assignment was to identify four of those points and with so many teams experiencing some sort of season-altering event, the list of choices was long. Whether a tailspin spurred by a crushing injury, an ascent sprouting from a fortunate play, or a subtle shift from a familiar path, rewinding the season to root out those fate-determining instances was an interesting exercise.

So as fans are marinating in thoughts of what could have been or riding high on waves of bounces that went their way, we look at four of this year’s critical turning points and invite you to complete the list–can you pinpoint the moment that defined your team’s season?

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PFF’s founder, Neil Hornsby, said recently that if you gave him any player in the league, he could give you 10 plays that would make him look like an All-Pro and 10 that would make you wonder how he’s collecting an NFL paycheck. While it’s the bulk of plays in between those extremes that actually define the player, the fringe examples are often what get lodged in the memories of fans and other observers of the game.

Those highlights and lowlights become the player’s story as they are repeatedly drilled into our consciousness. One angle is taken and run with until any other is drowned out.

For this week’s Scramble assignment, our four Scramblers have been tasked with taking four different angles to discuss a single player, Detroit’s Ndamukong Suh. Each of our guys will present a brief look at Suh–a player not short on story lines–with each stating their case as the essential interpretation of his career to date. Please keep in mind that this is, at most, an exercise and PFF’s grades on Suh’s performance should be taken as our collective final word on the matter. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve commissioned four of our excellent player participation analysts / writers to tackle this new feature we’re calling The Scramble. Each week they’ll be handed a new mission and it’ll be their duty to do the necessary digging and present their findings, thoughts, and opinions on the topic. It’ll take on many forms and they’ll have to be on their toes to turn around this combo effort in the time allotted.

For this initial edition, they’ve been asked to identify and highlight the most intriguing late round picks from the 2011 draft–surprising players who are making an immediate splash. With only the fifth-through-seventh-rounders available to them (undrafted free agents as well), they’ve returned with four players that have flashed legit NFL-level talent in these early stages of their careers. Staking their claim to one player each, they present to you a short list of new NFL-ers to watch as their roles grow. Read the rest of this entry »