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Hopes; I hope we can limit the Rivers to Gates connection.I hope our new kicker can make some kicks for us. I hope we can get in Rivers face consistently because I think Rivers is their only hope of winning this game.

I believe the Steelers will take care of their run game this week and win this game.

Will be fun to see how Mike Vick does this time around.

If I were a betting man I would add this site to my must reads.

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I have a theory—I think that these things are more and more tipping towards fantasy football (I know that’s the case for PFF) and consequently what they are evaluating is no longer so much how much a player helps his team but how much value he has as a fantasy player. Sometimes those things align, of course.

If you take the case of Heath Miller, Steelers fans have always believed he is undervalued in the larger community because so much of his value to the Steelers is as a blocker. Blocking doesn’t help your fantasy team, of course. But to be fair to PFF, the facet of his game that drags his score down is his run blocking. They consider him a good receiver and very good pass blocker.

But if you look at the top-rated tight end in the league (Gronkowski) you can tell that receiving trumps either kind of blocking. He’s actually quite a reasonable run blocker, although not so much in pass blocking. But the receiving end of it trumps everything else. The fact is, we don’t need a Gronkowski on the Steelers. Probably no one would turn down someone like that, but he would just be competing for touches with AB, Lev Bell, and Bryant. What we need is Heath Miller. Or a Matt Spaeth.

The other thing to think about is what is meant by “average.” In school an “average” grade should be a C. But in most places now you risk having an investigation into your teaching if you grade on a classic bell curve, with the majority of the grades in the middle (i.e. average) area. We have all become like the children in Lake Woebegone – we are all above average.

It’s clear that in the PFF system “average starter” is hardly a diss. They are just saying they aren’t, at least yet, an above-average player, which by definition is a small percentage of the league. (A grade of above 77.9 gets you into the “above average”—above 84.9 gets you into the Pro Bowl category, and above 89.9 gets you into All-Pro.) If you are graded below 70.0 you are considered back-up level, and below 60 is ‘below replacement.’ In other words, if you aren’t better (in their estimation) than approximately 2/3s of the league you are a back-up or worse.

Again, I’m not saying I agree with all of these grades. But also remember they are adjusting very quickly at the beginning of the season, and one bad game (or one good one) has much more of an effect on the player grade than it will later in the year, when things average out a good bit more. Two weeks ago William Gay was at 77.1 – near the top of ‘average starter,’ but his pass coverage took a nose dive the last two games. They still consider his run defense to be excellent – that score has been sitting over 80 all season – but they clearly weight slightly towards pass coverage. So a player in a system in which the DBs are important in run coverage is not going to look as good.

But I do think it is interesting to compare players, and this is one way to do it. I can’t imagine what the Chargers fans are saying right now when Philip Rivers was given a 68.0 score for last week’s game, in which he was the AFC offensive player of the week. Fortunately that’s not my problem…

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