{"id":60634,"date":"2025-05-18T19:49:08","date_gmt":"2025-05-18T19:49:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/60634\/"},"modified":"2025-05-18T19:49:08","modified_gmt":"2025-05-18T19:49:08","slug":"vikings-land-one-player-on-all-pff-team","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/60634\/","title":{"rendered":"Vikings Land One Player on All-PFF Team"},"content":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re into the throes of the offseason, folks, and we\u2019re still about two months away from the start of training camp, so a lot of what we\u2019re going to be talking about between now and then has to do with what other people are saying about the Minnesota Vikings<\/a>. To that end, we\u2019ve found one recent entry from a prominent analysis site that\u2019s a bit of a head-scratcher.<\/p>\n

Pro Football Focus has put together their \u201cAll-PFF\u201d team<\/a>, which they label as \u201cThe NFL\u2019s Best Players of the Past 25 years.\u201d If I were to tell you that only one member of the Minnesota Vikings had been named to the team, even as an Honorable Mention, who would you assume it was?<\/p>\n

Adrian Peterson? Nope.<\/p>\n

Jared Allen? Sorry.<\/p>\n

Harrison Smith? Try again.<\/p>\n

Well, surely it\u2019s Randy Moss, right? No, it isn\u2019t him, either.<\/p>\n

The only Viking who made a team comprised of the best NFL players of the past quarter century is. . .Antoine Winfield.<\/p>\n

Winfield\u2019s NFL career began in 1999, though even his seven remaining seasons in the PFF era yielded one of the best career marks of all time. He was among the 10 highest-graded players for his position in five out of seven years, and the top-graded player at his position three times between 2006 and when he retired in 2012.<\/p>\n

While Winfield owns a top-10 PFF coverage grade all time (92.3), where he\u2019s unique on this list of cornerbacks is that he also owns the best PFF run-defense grade (94.7) out of 355 qualifiers at the position since 2006. Winfield\u2019s 107 run defense stops are tied for the second most of all time among cornerbacks, while his 2.47-yard average depth of tackle against the run ranks as the best mark among 137 qualifiers since 2006.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m as big a Winfield fan as you\u2019ll find, and it\u2019s nice to see him get some recognition on a team like this. However, the team as a whole is a pretty solid example of why this sort of analysis is a little tough to understand at times.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m going to focus on Moss\u2019 exclusion here because. . .well, because it\u2019s ridiculous. Randy Moss was a first-ballot Hall of Famer. That alone gets him on a list of the best players of the past quarter century, or at least it should. However, because this is based on PFF grades, he doesn\u2019t make the cut. Heck, he doesn\u2019t even get an Honorable Mention.<\/p>\n

The three wide receivers who did make the cut were Julio Jones, Antonio Brown, and Tyreek Hill, with Calvin Johnson getting the Honorable Mention spot. First off, Calvin Johnson was\/is better than the three guys who made the team, and Moss was\/is above him on the hierarchy, so we\u2019re already into weird territory here. I\u2019m not saying that Jones, Brown, and Hill aren\u2019t great wide receivers, or weren\u2019t in their time. But none of those three guys are on Randy Moss\u2019 level.<\/p>\n

As we usually say when we cite Pro Football Focus for stuff, a lot of their numbers are guidance, not gospel. No matter what grading system you use, if Randy Moss isn\u2019t on your short list of the best wide receivers of the past 25 years, your system probably needs to be revisited.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We\u2019re into the throes of the offseason, folks, and we\u2019re still about two months away from the start…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":60635,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2073],"tags":[2763,1310,7,29,3020,233,259,1312,2529,6,1311,144,3731,3252,188,185,234],"class_list":{"0":"post-60634","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-minnesota-vikings","8":"tag-all","9":"tag-daily","10":"tag-football","11":"tag-front-page","12":"tag-land","13":"tag-minnesota","14":"tag-minnesota-vikings","15":"tag-minnesota-vikings-news","16":"tag-minnesotavikings","17":"tag-nfl","18":"tag-norseman","19":"tag-on","20":"tag-one","21":"tag-pff","22":"tag-player","23":"tag-team","24":"tag-vikings"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/114530573821279093","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60634"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60634\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}