Grades and Growth: Mitch Trubisky and the People v Pro Football Focus

If you have been paying much attention to Bears twitter (or you've dared to tweet something positive about Mitch Trubisky only to find Goddamn Detroit Lions Fans of all people invading your mentions to screech "bUt HiS PfF gRaDe") since around the time Mitch Trubisky's second season began to show some promise in week 4 against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, you'll have no doubt encountered the famous problem of Trubisky's deplorable PFF grade failing to align with his mostly very good traditional or even non-PFF advanced analytics. Lest Bears fans spend even a minute thinking that having a QB who was above average in terms of completion %, yards per attempt, adjusted net yards per attempt, touchdown %, sack %, QB rating, Total QBR, and expected points added is a good thing, someone (and, again, it's always a goddamn Lions fan) will come bursting through the wall like the world's most depressing Kool-Aid man to once more cite the sacred texts and tell you that actually a bunch of dude's in Ireland figured out how to chart football players on a play by play basis and we have determined their findings are law and render all of the above null and void. Trubisky, if you didn't know, ranked 33rd in the league in terms of overall PFF grade at QB, behind such luminaries as the deposed Blake Bortles and beloved Start Kyle Orton punching bag Josh Allen. You are not to question the inherent absurdity of this statement and how incongruous it is with, y'know, every other available form of measuring a quarterback's performance. You are to accept that you have been owned, and to scurry back into your hole in shame. Once you get there you'll still find that same fucking Detroit Lions fan, though. He lives there. It's all he's ever known. Dragging others into the hole is all he's got man.

Bears fans, however, have never been known to go quietly into the night or really go quietly anywhere. They have gathered their swords and sprung to their quarterback's defense with arguments ranging from tinfoil hattery ("they are biased against Mitch!") to more well thought-out critiques of PFF and their grading methods. You wouldn't be reading this site (if you're reading it at all, which you probably aren't. It appears taking a break of a mere *checks notes* four years did some damage to my overall readership) if you weren't looking for more of the latter, so here goes nothing: Pro Football Focus grade of Mitch isn't wrong, nor does it reflect any kind of bias on their part. It's also pretty much irrelevant.

Imagine, if you will, that a football season is a 16 week college course. Each week there is a test, worth exactly 6.25% of your grade. You need a 70% overall to pass the course, but in the first three weeks of the season your drunk ass failed to show up to class and you got a zero. Week 4 starts and you've already completely wasted 18.75% of the available points. You've basically got to be perfect in every single week from then on in order to ensure a  passing grade. You do your best, but there are some weeks you get an A and then there are some weeks you get Cs. Those last 13 weeks of the year you average out to being more or less a B student. You get 80% of the remaining points overall, but at the end of the year, thanks to those three zeros in the first three classes, you get a 65 in the course. You're a failure, your dad's mad he spent a dime sending you to school, and pretty much anybody looking at your semester from a distance would deem it a failure.

And yet...you did improve, didn't you? You were a B student for a greater % of the weeks you were in class than you were an F student. You learned a lot, you actually understood the point of the class, but alas, the transcript never lies, does it? If you were to take the class next fall, though, and you managed perfect attendance, would it be wise for someone to bet that you'll fail it again?