The Kevin Sheehan Show - PFF on Haskins, Rivera, and More

Episode Date: May 23, 2020

Kevin had Sam Monson/Lead Analyst-Pro Football Focus on the show today. So many topics covered from how PFF got started, to how NFL teams utilize PFF, to plenty on Dwayne Haskins, Ron Rivera, and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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It's what everyone's talking about. The Kevin Sheehan Show. Now here's Kevin. All right, a Saturday podcast, which is unusual for us. I wanted you guys to have more time to listen to what was a longer podcast on Thursday with Tommy. I know it entertained many of you, and many of you did not. I'm sorry about that. but I do like when Tommy and I have not necessarily a plan for the show,

and then it goes much longer than we thought it would. I can't tell you how many days I did a show with him on radio where we were like, what are we doing today? And we would just say, we'll figure it out when it starts. And then other days were completely structured segment by segment, if not within each segment. But I do love doing the show with Tommy, and I hope for those of you that enjoy it, I'm glad you do.

Joining me today on the show here momentarily will be Sam Monson. Sam works for Pro Football Focus. He's their lead analyst. He has got an interesting background, and he's going to tell us about Dwayne Haskins. He's going to tell us what Pro Football Focus thinks of Dwayne Haskins. He's going to get into the very interesting dilemma that guys at Pro Football Focus think that the Redskins faced at number two in this draft with respect to Chase Young or to a Tung of Iloa as an example. We're going to get into a top 101 list from the 2010s, which Pro Football Focus recently put out.

I think you'll be surprised where Trent Williams landed in terms of how many tackles were in front of him on this list. We'll also go through the quarterback list for the 2010s because I found that to be. interesting as well. Wanted to start. There was, you know, there was some news last night. Patrick Ewing testing positive for COVID-19. We obviously wish Patrick the best. It's been a tough time for Georgetown basketball.

Obviously, this is a life issue, not a sports issue. But he did say yesterday, late yesterday, I want to share that I've tested positive for COVID-19. His statement went on to say this virus is serious and should not be taken lightly. I want you to encourage everyone to stay safe and take care of yourselves and your loved ones. Now more than ever, I want to thank the health care workers and everyone on the front lines. I'll be fine and we will all get through this. That was Patrick Ewing. Hopefully it will turn out well for him.

Patrick has got to be, well, I think Patrick's like 56, 57 years old. I think that's, he might be a little bit older than that now. he's not in that he's not in that you know over 75 category is Patrick 60 yet actually I could be wrong on that he's 57 years old I had that right

he's going to be 58 in August so we wish Patrick the best you know there's some really interesting news with respect to sports a sports return you know first of all the NHL

seems to be getting the closest to a return You know, the Players Association and the owners seem to be much more on the same page. Greg Wischinski from ESPN's been doing some very good reporting on this. Last night, the Executive Board of the National Hockey League Players Association approved a 24-team playoff format for a return to the game. So the regular season would be done. They would go straight to a 24-team playoff format.

12 teams per conference. It would be the top 12 records when the season suspended. So the teams that were on the edge that we're going to need to fight to get into playoff position are actually going to be in the postseason. They will give the first four teams in each conference a first round by, and then the seeds five through 12 will play a first round best of five and then advance to what would be the final eight in each conference. And the normal. playoff format. I like that. Apparently, the players will vote on this, and based on what you read, we're getting close to more likely than not an approval of a format to move forward with. And then, obviously, it'll come down to whether or not, you know, from a medical standpoint and a safety

standpoint, they're ready to do it. Just as an aside, the Caps had the third best record in the East when the season was suspended. So they would be the three-seed and would have a first round by and would face the winner of the 6-11 matchup, which would be Carolina and the Rangers. So that would happen there in the first round. Another, on the opposite end of the NHL, which appears to be nearing a plan to return, would be the Major League Baseball ML, you know, Major League Baseball Players Association issue. There is definitely big issues here that look like they're going to be very difficult to solve.

First of all, Major League Baseball and the Players Association aren't even in agreement on how this would work from a logistical standpoint. Like there is, let's agree on what the game will look like and the safety precaution we are going to take. The Major League Baseball, the Players Association, basically had a big response to a 67-page proposed set of protocols that were put forth to them for a return to baseball. Management had presented these 67 pages to the Union and the 30 teams a few weeks ago. And yesterday, the union got back to Major League Baseball and said, you know, there are still issues like they considered many of the issues that baseball's put forth to be over the top, such as arriving in uniform at ballparks, a prohibition on players leaving without team permission, and a ban on guests other than immediate family members. Players also objected to a ban on the use of showers and hydrotherapy. The union wants more frequent testing than management's proposed, which is multiple times a week they want. So the players and the owners seem to be far apart on just the logistics of how it would work

if they agree on the economics. And the economics are going to be the big issue with a return to baseball. There are a couple of big problems here, and that is this, that Major League Baseball and the players, when this pandemic started, essentially agreed to a pro-rata portion of the salaries being paid out by the owners to players. So whenever the number of games was determined would be played to finish out the season, they would be paid on a pro-rata basis. So they wouldn't be paid for the games they didn't play in, but they would be paid for the rest of them. The problem with that is, according to the owners, is that was based on the assumption of having fans available to attend the games. And now that it would be more likely than not, no fans in attendance, well, the owners are looking at a major, you know, 35 to 40 percent cut in their revenue overall, but more than they had projected when they came to disagreement with the players in March.

The players don't care. They feel like they have an agreement. The owners say, well, conditions have changed. John Heyman put out a tweet. John Heyman, who's a big-time insider at MLB Network, put out a tweet a couple days ago, and he said, basically, he summed it up as follows. Major League Baseball in recent talks gave the union two options.

One, you either negotiate a new financial arrangement, something other than the pro-rated pay for the players that we negotiated in March because there aren't going to be fans in attendance, or we're going to wait until the coronavirus is completely clear to the point where fans can attend games. This Major League Baseball, Major League Baseball Players Association is going to turn into an impasse. It would appear. And I believe the players will get blamed for this. I do.

I think ultimately it's easy for players to say the owners are billionaires. They can afford this. And oh, by the way, if the owners do really well in a season, they don't get an additional bump in salary. So now that we've taken a hit in revenue, they shouldn't be asked to take much more. They also have the whole concern over what's perceived to be rev share. But I don't know why they would be concerned about it.

Why isn't it just perceived or why isn't it just taken as an emergency plan to play the 2020 season under duress essentially? I don't know why they think taking an inch would mean that the owners would then be looking to take feet and miles after that. It doesn't make any sense to me. Quick word about Roman, all right? If you were to guess on average how many days people in the U.S. have to wait to see a doctor, what would you say? A week maybe. Actually, on average, people have to wait around 29 days to see a doctor in major U.S. cities. Basically, a month. If you're dealing with a condition like erectile dysfunction, you want treatment ASAP.

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Sheehan, S-H-E-H-E-H-A-N for a free online visit and free two-day shipping. That's get-roman.com, promo code Sheehan for a free online visit and free two-day shipping. All right, let's bring in Sam Monson, who is a lead analyst at Pro Football Focus, and they've done some recent things with respect to the quarterback position. They rank the top 101 players of the 2010s. and I wanted to get Sam's insight on the Redskins in particular. But, you know, before I called you to record this for the podcast, I was looking at your Twitter account.

You're Irish. How did you, how long have you been in the States? Moved over here in the summer of 2017, so almost three years now. And, yeah, I've been with PFF pretty much since the beginning. beginning. We were lucky enough to be kind of in on the ground floor, one of the first guys working here. And then, so we sort of seen the whole thing grow from nothing to where it is to where Chris Collinsworth ends up buying the company. And that's when everybody starts to up sticks and move to Cincinnati. That's pretty wild. So just tell me, before we get into some of the stuff that I was

calling you about originally, I'm just interested in this. So you moved to the states in 2017. When did you become a huge fan of American football of the NFL? Years before, I lived in Minnesota for a year when I was a kid. My dad was a surgeon, so we moved around a lot. And I think I kind of always kept some kind of following from it from back then. And then you go to college, and that's when you can actually watch games, crazy times in the morning over in the UK and Ireland. So at that point, I think my sort of interest in it really kicked back up again and then was active enough in the community over there,

the football following community, to be able to be on Neil Hornby's radar when he needed people to help him start grading games at TFS. So that's how I got in. Neil being the founder of Pro Football Focus. And you mentioned the Collinsworth Purchase, and now I'm a little bit more interested in this first. So I'll get to the Redskins stuff in a moment. but did you, were you a Vikings fan? Did you live in Minneapolis? We lived in Rochester, Minneapolis, or Rochester, Minnesota, rather. So a little bit outside, but yeah, the Vikings fans for all my fault.

So are you still a Vikings fan? Yeah, I think so. You know, when you become a sort of analyst of all 32 teams, you sort of lose a little bit of the fandom, and you're more just sort of in the day-to-day grind of it, but, yeah, still a soft spot for the Vikings still, you know, forlornly hoping that at some point they'll get over the hump. Yeah, well, I'm going to remind myself right now to circle back to this because I am one of the Redskin fans in D.C., Sam, that is also a huge Kirk Cousins fan. I think they made a big mistake, not being aggressive early and getting him signed to a long-term contract. There was a, you know,

you remember the situation here. It was really messed up seven ways to Sunday with the way the team handled it, but I'm still a fan of his, and I actually want to get your thoughts on him, and we'll do that a little bit later on. Just real quickly, because I think a lot of NFL fans and a lot of my audience who are Redskinned fans, everybody's familiar with, you know, sort of this meteoric rise of pro football focus and this advanced statistical way of looking at, you know, not just every player, but nearly every play that every player plays in. You mentioned the founder, and you said that you were one of the early employees, like how early? Were you there on the ground floor when it launched? Well, yeah, kind of. I was like the third guy in the

door, depending on, you know, how exactly you're measuring it. Neil sets it up, Neil sort of comes up with the idea, sets get the website functioning. He hires a guy called Ben Stockwell to do, to help with the grading and to sort of flesh out the whole process, Ben very quickly realized that in order to understand how good a guy is from grading terms, you need to know how many times he was on the field, because obviously the same grade on 10 snaps versus 50 snaps is completely different. So Ben sort of devised this player participation system, and at that point they needed people to come in and start doing that. So that's when I came on board. So yeah, one of the very first people on board to help do games.

And for the first sort of a couple of years, the core team there was sort of like five guys, which I was, you know, one of the guys there. Just out of curiosity, what's the business model? Where are the revenues? Do they come from teams? It sort of, it split down the middle. We've got all 32 NFL teams are customers.

We've got 70 plus college teams, CFL teams, media. entities, you know, the big networks, and then we sell to consumers as well. So that's the whole other side of the business is our edge and elite products where we sell the PFF grades. We sell the advanced statistics, we sell fantasy information and greenline, the betting data. So we've got to split 50-50 from the B-to-B side of things where we sell to teams and big networks and then the individual customers. When Collinsworth purchased pro football focus, did he purchase a majority stake or was he an investor? Yeah, no, he purchased majority stake, almost the whole shebang.

Interesting. You know, one of the things is I did a show for several years with Chris Cooley, the Redskins' former tight end, and he's a really good friend. And he comes on this podcast with me all the time as well. And early on, it was interesting because as people would say to us, well, didn't you see what Jordan Reed's pro football focus grade was from that game? And Cooley did this thing, Sam, on a weekly basis after games, where he graded the players. And he said that the biggest, early on, he wasn't necessarily a fan just to be completely honest with you, in part because his feeling was in many cases the evaluation of a player, was off at the start because pro football focus didn't understand the responsibility of the player on a given play. For example, he would say, you know, Jordan Reed, or the guard was supposed to get to a double team, missed the double team, but handled the first block, whatever it was.

But he would say, you know, in many cases, and he understood how the coaches were grading the players, that the grades weren't matching up. I will tell you that a year or two later, he thought you guys were really. much sharper in your evaluation. But what is the whole in the evaluation of a player? Is it that you don't know necessarily what the responsibility of a player on a given play is? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a good thing that as we've been doing this, we've been getting more and more NFL feedback and more knowledge within the grading system. So the fact that we improved in his eyes, I think it's a good testament to that.

But look, we're in the same boat as everybody else. Anybody from the outside is not going to know what goes on within specific team meeting rooms and the exact weird, you know, eccentricities in a specific assignment. Nobody's going to know that, including every other NFL team that's, you know, scouting for their future opponents. If you're watching the Patriots and you're not in that Patriots meeting room, you don't know their exact assignments either. So everybody's working from either a... either a best guess or a extrapolating the information they do have based off every other team in the

NFL. And that's the other aspect of this is most teams are running kind of the same stuff. You know, inside zone. By and large it's inside zone. Outside zone is the same. The rules are very similar. You can decipher what everybody is doing. Now, everybody has little bits of quirks and wrinkles to that, and you can be led astrayic.

But those are pretty small percentages in the overall scheme of things. And I think one of the tenets that you have that is, and this is particularly relevant when it comes to, you know, coverage busts on the back end. And you just, you don't know who screwed it up, right? Somebody's made a big mistake. There's a receiver running free in the defense. And maybe it's the safety. Maybe it's the cornerback.

Maybe the whole thing started because the linebacker went in the wrong place. And everybody, Domino started to fall. Right. If we don't know who completely screwed up, if we're not confident who made the mess up, everybody gets a zero grade and we don't try and guess, right? We just put it down as a nothing on the play. It doesn't really get graded, and we move on to the next one. Rather than try and guess, get it wrong, and swing a guys grade massively because we were on the wrong side of it.

So one of the biggest things we do is if we're not sure on these plays, we don't guess and we put everybody down with the kind of default catch-all grade, and then we'll come back and we'll try and get more information out of NFL teams, and we'll try and get a better sense of what happened on those plays. So I think as the years have gone on, we've tightened up a lot of the blind spots in the system. How do teams use you guys? Like you said that you have contracts with – did you say all 32 teams? Yeah.

So give me an example of how a team uses your service. Do they use it for their own evaluation or for opponents' evaluations more? Yeah, I mean, the thing is, 32 NFL teams, 32 different levels of competency at everything, right? Whether it's football, whether it's data, whether it's analytics on the back end, whether it's video guys. So teams use this in completely different ways depending on who it is, and they use this in almost every single way you can think of. The biggest way that every single team uses PFS is we have a system called PFS Ultimate that ties our data into their video system. So Monday for teams used to be coming in and setting QC coaches to work, creating cut-up reels for the opposition next week, right? That doesn't happen anymore because it's all PFSF ultimate.

Those QC coaches can now actually do real work on a Monday instead of spending their day, you know, grinding through tape and working back. actually the last four weeks to pull up whatever it is, coaches want on a week. Everything can be done in like 25 minutes on a Monday morning using PSS system. So we're saving every NFL team 24 hours of work at the start of the week. I think that's the biggest thing. But we've heard all kinds of stories. You know, teams have used us to self-scout their coaching grades. You know, they've used PSF grades.

They've compared them to the grade that their coaches are giving internally and saying, whoa, these guys are, these are some very high numbers, these coaches are giving when the data says that these guys aren't doing that well, when the role numbers say they're not doing that well, you know, why they're being so generous? But we've also, you know, heard stories of guys just using the grading to get a better understanding of tape study, you know, pull up these guys, pull up the best players out there. We've seen teams using it for, you know, free agency evaluation for draft to get sort of a jump start on, on personnel decisions, basically any way you can think of, the data is applicable to them.

You said that every team's got different levels of competencies, I think, is what you said. So who are, I mean, these are clients, your viewers, so I understand the sensitivity to sort of evaluating their competencies. But can you tell me, like, who's really super sharp in your opinion and who isn't? Yeah, I can't really because, like you say, all teams are... No, that makes sense. Sure. But they are the teams that you would think. You know, there aren't really surprises here.

The teams that you think of is extremely sharp and extremely on the ball when it comes to data when it comes to the forefront of analytics and decision-making. Generally speaking, those teams are the teams, you know, that have smart people in place that do a really good job of the data. And, you know, they come to us with... not with problems, but with things that they want. You know, hey, this is what we're looking to do. Can you guys do this, or can you add this, or can you make this happen for us?

And those are the teams that are really fun to deal with because they set us on the right direction for, you know, new improvements and additions and all that kind of stuff. I would assume then, you know, being in this market and being a part of following the Redskins and being a part of their broadcast, actually, for many years, as they're, as they're, pregame host that the Redskins, let's just say, are in the bottom third. Would that be fair? Well, they were one of the last teams to come on board, but they did eventually see the light and understand the value that we can brain do it. You know, I'm curious in a business like pro football focus, what the liquidity strategy is.

I would assume that because you've got all of this information and all of these clients, that a public offering wouldn't be necessarily the path that you guys are exploring, or am I wrong? Well, so we always have this tension between how much can we give away to the consumer versus how much do we have to keep behind with teams so that they're getting this value on the back end for a dramatic amount more. And, you know, early on there was definitely a case of some teams not wanting to pay the big corporate price because they could get 80% of what they wanted for. from the

as a user. Right, from the user end, the front end stuff. But the big game changer was that PFF ultimate being able to tie it into their video system. And now, even if you can get 80% of the data that you want on the front end,

you can't get that. You know, you can't get the ability to tie it into your video system. And that's what saves you 24 hours of work. So it's not just paying us money to do things. It's saving 24 hours of work from every coach you have, making these cut-ups, it's saving 24 hours of work for everybody that's twiddling their thumbs on a Monday waiting for these cutups to come in.

So it's saving them a huge amount of money and time and potentially competitive edge to do that. So I think that was the big sort of watershed moment in terms of, all right, we don't need to worry anymore about giving away too much on the front end because the back end, the capability of what the bank end stuff, what the corporate account gets teams is now so valuable, even with the data getting similar or merging together, I guess. We're talking to Sam Monson, who is with Pro Football Focus, the lead analyst, and he was one of the first early employees in the company.

And the company is doing very well. It was acquired by Chris Collinsworth a few years ago. We hear Collinsworth on Sunday Night Football promoted and talk about, and NBC's adopted a lot of that and uses a lot of your rankings in their Sunday night broadcast. I had one other question just before we get to the Redskins. Oh, you know, is it fair to say, Sam, that of the major sports, the four major sports in America, football, baseball, hockey, and basketball, that baseball's the sport where you can measure the most accurately, and football would be the sport maybe where you could measure the least accurately,

because of the number of players and the number of things going on in each individual play. Is that fair or not? It's certainly the most complicated. Right. I don't know if it's, you know, you can measure so many different things, and it's the case of working out what to do with it all. So, you know, football is just so incredibly complicated. It's such a fascinating game, and the reason I think all of us love it is because ultimately

it's simple or as complicated as you want to make it, right? It's all the way from it's blocking and tackling, stupid, the end, to just this never-ending labyrinth of data and analytics and numbers telling you you should do one thing or you should move the percentages here and trying to seal an edge at each step of the road. And you're never going to get 100% of the way there. You know, you're never going to reach this point where data leads you to every single decision you make and there's a right answer every step of the way. It's just never going to work that way because it's too complicated.

There are too many moving parts. There are too many things that influence every other thing you're looking at. So you're always going to have to use it as a tool. And it's just going to be an area where you're stealing percentages here and there. And a good way of looking at it is when we come to the draft evaluation process, we've only been grading college football since 2014. So we've had this for the last few years have been this learning. on the job process of, well, how much does the grading translate to the NFL, and then how much

does other data, and what to look at and what to focus on and what to push in terms of our evaluations versus the general consensus out there. And we've sort of learned as we've gone along the way, and then every year people will be like, well, you guys said, you know, this guy was going to be really good, so I'm not going to listen to you. You're like, well, look, nobody's ever going to bathe thousand. Like the best people that drafting in the NFL are like their strike rate is like 30%. You know, everybody does it.

Yeah, exactly. Right. Like everybody is terrible. The key is moving your percentage, right? If you can go from 30 to 40, you're the best drafter in NFL history and you have a massive advantage over somebody. Like, broader speaking, you're still batting at 40%. You're still bad. But that's not the goal here.

The goal is just to get better than everybody else because then you have an advantage. So I think that's all anybody is striving for with this stuff is just finding little pieces of an edge here and there to try and overall improve your advantage over everybody else. Yeah, I love what you said about the draft because I've sort of been preaching that through the years. We love the NFL draft. It's a phenomenal television show. But it's the thing that we know the least about as sports fans and even the expert analysts. It's the least they know about. It's the least the teams know about.

As you said, a good hit rate, a good strike rate is probably in the 30 to 35 percent range in terms of just contributors within three years after the drafting. Yet we sound so expert during that weekend. I always find that actually wildly entertaining. You know, we're talking to Sam Monson. He's a lead analyst at Pro Football Focus. you can follow him on Twitter at PFF underscore Sam. And by the way, I love your description where you say, Irish NFL analyst from the Emerald Isle itself,

PFF's lead NFL analyst, prematurely predicting decline. You know, I guess that's better than predicting premature decline, which would be much worse. But follow Sam on Twitter. All right, I want to ask you about Dwayne Haskins to get into the Redskins stuff. how much can seven starts, which is what he had last year, how much can seven starts really tell you about a young rookie quarterback? Yeah, the answer is not much, sadly.

I think everybody wants to think that it does. Well, no, that's not true. I think it can tell you a lot, but the times where it does is very rare. You know, like when guys like Russell Wilson come on the scene, it's immediately obvious to everybody right from the get-go that we just had it wrong, or that a lot of people had it wrong, right? That he is not a third-round talent.

He's a better player than that. And immediately, you understood that he was a better player than that. But most players aren't Russell Wilson. Most players land somewhere in the middle, and the guys that land in the middle, it's a really small sample size to try and parse out and to use to predict things. So, you know, we've seen players have seven-game sample sizes, even just in the middle of their career that are completely anomalous to anything else they've done, right?

And if you were using that to predict forward what they were going to be, you would be wildly off base. So, you know, we can look at little bits and pieces and we can try and dive deeper than the overall analysis and try and pick out little bits of signs of encouragement. We know which aspects of play are more predictive than others going forward, but it's still such a small sample size that ultimately we're all, you know, we're all just guessing here. We all just need to wait for a bigger sample size of data to have a better understanding of what he is. Well, certainly his seven starts didn't tell you what Russell Wilson's first seven starts did.

I think we can all sort of understand that. But what did you gauge from the seven starts? And I would exclude the two relief appearances, especially the first one. I think you understand what the context was. here, it was dysfunctional like it's typically been, you know, in the past, but last year in particular, what did his seven starts tell you about him? Yeah, I think the signs were quite encouraging. You know, his box score numbers didn't look great, right? Seven touchdowns, seven interceptions. That's not what you're shooting for, particularly when the other rookies out there,

Daniel Jones, Kyla Murray, Gardner Minshue, those guys are all 20 touchdowns plus, and it's like a two-to-one touchdown interception ratio. So you look at those, you're saying, like, wow, he's way behind these other guys. But if you start diving deeper into the actual grading of those plays, touchdowns and interceptions can lie, right? A touchdown can be a bubble screen that a receiver breaks four tackles on and goes distance, or it can be like a great throw deep down field. It's the same statistic, but one of them is a much better quarterback play than the other.

And similarly, interceptions can be, like an interception can be a well-thrown pass. Like the receiver drops it, it bounces into the hands of a defensive bankers. picked off, like, that's the receiver's fault. It's not on the quarterback. And also, you know, you can have terrible, terrible passes that end up a defensive backdrops that, and they're not intercepted, or they're even caught as a positive play. So those numbers generally can lie, and they don't always, but sometimes they do, and so PFF's grading sort of takes account of those. And we look at things called big-time throws. They're sort of our substitute for touchdowns. their highest-graded throws we make,

and then turnover-worthy play. So whether or not it was picked off, we don't care. It's just whether you put the ball in a dangerous place, and it should have been turned over, whether it was or not. So you look at those, and Haskins is still good when it comes to protecting the ball. He didn't put it in harm's way very often, but suddenly his big-time throw rate, the sort of the touchdown side of things,

that jumps much higher up when you start to focus on those instead of the, the touchdown. So when you consider he played a lot less in these other guys, his big-time throw rate was actually in the same ballpark as Daniel Jones, as Kyla Murray, as Minchu. So that I think is encouraging is that, you know, the early on certainly he was always good at protecting the ball, but really didn't make enough big plays to offset the fact that he wasn't, you know, the conservative nature of his play. Later on, I think he did. He started to open up a little bit, and he saw flashes that, you know, when he sees it and he trusts what he sees and lets the ball fly, he's got this unquestioned

arm talent that is rare. Not a lot of quarterbacks have that. So I think at the minimum, you know, we can be encouraged by what we saw from Haskins. Rank the quarterbacks, in your opinion, based on future success, the first rounders from last year. So Murray, Jones, Haskins, you know, I'll throw in lock from the second round. Give me, give me, Give me your best guess in terms of future success of the young quarterbacks that were drafted in 2019. I think honestly, it's still pretty much draft order. I think Kylo Murray is the one you have to be most confident in. I think he probably showed overall the most in his rookie year in a situation in Arizona that wasn't the best in the world.

And not only him learning on the job, but a rookie head coach learning on the job. They started that season running this college spread offense, 10 personnel, you know, four wide receivers all day. And by like week five, they realized that just wasn't working in the NFL. Like, you can't do that, at least not without some pretty significant modifications. So they backed way off that. I think year two for that entire offense is going to look an awful lot better. Plus, you know, the addition of New Hopkins, that receiver gives him a viable number one target

that he didn't have last year. then I think the next two are closer. It's Daniel Jones and Dwayne Haskins. You know, coming out, we thought Haskins was a better quarterback prospect. I think the hype has gotten a little bit out of control for Daniel Jones, but I will concede that he had a better rookie year than I think we anticipated he might. And again, he's at least shown enough that he's now in the same kind of conversation as Haskin. So I think those two are both in the same kind of area.

And then Drew Locke, we really haven't seen enough of. He had a couple of games and got people very excited in Denver, but honestly, like, the majority of that excitement was just him not being Joe Flacco. So let's reserve judgment to we see what he can really do in here, too. Did the Redskins at number two last month make the right choice in drafting Chase Young, or did you have Tuatunga Vailoa rated so high that you think they should have considered that? This is a really fascinating area, right? because this is one of those scenarios where the data will say a few different things,

and there's no, I don't think there's a clear right answer in this, right? And I don't know if you're ever going to get one. So the math people, the data science guys in PFF, George Shahuri and Eric Eager, those guys would say quarterback is so important, and it moves the needle in terms of wins above replacement so much more than any other position that unless you're certain you have a guy, you keep swinging. So you draft a quarterback. you draft Tua, and if you end up in the same position next year and you end up with

the quarterback, you take a third one, you just keep going until you find that quarterback. And maybe, you know, maybe Haskins not Tua will be the guy that comes out of that competition, but the fact that you double your chances of finding the guy is the important aspect. But you then have to look at it and say, well, then there's a confidence level, right? Chase Young is pretty much universally accepted to be, I think, the best player in that draft, an incredible talent, probably the best edge-rushing talent we see come out, and we've seen some great ones since the FF has been grading.

So you have to say, well, even though his position doesn't move the needle as much as quarterback or even cornerback, you know, you could have gone Jeffrey Akuta or receiver with a C.D. Lam or Jerry Judy, even though his position doesn't move the needle as much as those, there is value to the certainty that we all have that he's going to be good. And even though everybody's only batting, you know, 30 percent in terms of draft, devalves, certain guys roll around when it's like Quentin Nelson, where everybody is certain that this guy is going to be a superstar. And I think there's some value to that, and we're not far enough along yet in being able to accurately weigh the two different sides of that, right? How much

do you focus on the most valuable position in football versus how much do you focus on the certainty in getting this pick right? I think that it's really interesting. The whole keep swinging until you get it right at quarterback. I mean, there's probably nothing wrong with that mindset. You didn't even add into the complexity with what the Redskins were dealing with at number two. The injury factor in the injury history with Tua. You did say something, though, there that struck me because I had this conversation with Charlie Casserly and a few other people recently. Scott McLuhan, I had the conversation with Scott McLuhan recently, and I said, have we gotten to a point in football where corner is just as important as pass rusher or even interior pass rusher is just as important as edge pass rusher.

And they all said no, that still if you have the elite game wrecking edge pass rusher, that that's the second most impactful position in the game behind quarterback. It sounds like you disagree. Yeah, and that's one area where I think analytics is pushing a different narrative. that the analytics would say that cornerback is absolutely more valuable than pass rusher in terms of the effect it can have on a game. And usually analytics, it all works because of the weight of big numbers. But even on an anecdotal level, you can kind of see this play out, right?

You can have an amazing, the best pass rusher in the NFL. The best pass rusher in the NFL can kind of get neutralized by the best past protector in the NFL. Generally, when those two meet, the past blocker wins, the best cornerback in the NFL will shut down the best receivers in the NFL, or at least shut them down to the point where they are not the same players anymore. You know, what you think what Doreau Revis was able to do back at his best, shadow those number one guys, limit their production to a level that just was not the same as when somebody else was covering them, it changes what happens, I think, significantly more than a dominant edge rush does. The point.

problem is the cornerback is a lot more volatile, it's a lot less stable than pass rusher. So if you have like the same level of dominance in a single season, the cornerback is a more valuable thing. But the edge rusher is more likely to be the same next year. Right. Cornerback is more likely to swing back down, have a dip, have a bad year, and not be the same guy. And that's the problem, right, is that it's not necessarily which. one is more valuable in the vacuum, which one is going to be more valuable over the length of, say, his rookie contract or say the 10 years that you're going to have them there, and that's again where it starts to get more complicated and where it becomes a debate again.

Really interesting stuff. So a couple of thoughts on that. Number one, what you just said there at the end makes sense anecdotally based on how we watch as fans. Like, cornerbacks tend to be up and down. And my intuitive answer to that would be system. Like you have to as a corner be in the right system. You can be Dorel Revis, but if you're in a primary, if you're primarily in a zone-based coach defensive system, your impact may be less. And then the other thought that I had too with respect to you saying corner, which I don't know if I intuitively believe, But when you got to what was more sustainable, what was more sort of predictably sustainable, an edge rusher more than a corner, that made sense to me.

But the reason that I even asked the question of people like Casserly and McLuhan is, you know, just the RPO introduction into the game, how many teams now go to quick throws West Coast, quick get it out? I mean, we saw Chase Young neutralized to a certain degree in that semi-final game. against a great quarterback where they schemed against him, where they doubled them and tripled them at times, and Lawrence was getting it out before he could even get there. I thought he had an impact on the game, and I think people that were watching the game understood his impact, even though statistically it didn't bear out. But what do you say about some of that?

I know I just gave you a lot there. But cornerback system to start, how important is that? Oh, it's huge. I mean, cornerback, that's why the draft for cornerbikes is so strange, there are teams who will have a guy on their board that's number one. This is our number one corner in this draft, and he'll be like a third rounder for somebody else, because it just doesn't fit in the distance. It's almost completely different positions. So I think scheme is everything for these corners.

If you're not taking a guy that fits in your scheme, you might as well set fire to the draft take. It's just wasting everybody's time. But the neutralizing a player is interesting as well, because for that, you don't need to look any. farther than look at Aaron Donald and JJ Watt, right? Those are the two best defenders in the NFL over the last 10 years. And there are plenty of games where both those guys have been completely taken out of the game, right? And it's why each one of them remains underrated despite

the fact that they're like defensive players of the year, because the whole bunch of people will look at them and say, well, he disappeared in this big game here. And you're like, well, did he actually disappear or did he get triple-teens all game and they spend the entire game getting the ball out in like one and a half seconds. Like those are not the same thing. Exactly. And, you know, Donald, Donald is the most interesting one because he leads all players in the last decade in terms of pass rush win rate, right?

Now, interior players are not supposed to do that. Interior players get less pressure than edge rushers. And Donald leads all of them. He leads von Miller. Like, Von Miller is one of the best pass rushes in NFL history, and Donald wins more often by a significant margin over the entire decade. But there are games where teams go out there and they say, look, Aaron Donald is not going to be a factor in this game.

So the entire game plan is Hingiran, taking him away, getting rid of the ball before he gets there. And you can take him out of the game. So no matter how good your pass rusher is, you can remove him as a factor in the game. But if you have a good enough corner, if you have Doreau Rivas, shadowing your number one receiver the whole way, the only way of taking him out of the game is to decide that your number one target is not going to get the ball all day.

And almost every NFL team hates that. Nobody wants to go into a game and accept that their best offensive weapon is not going to see the ball all game long. So even the best cornerbacks tend to still get the ball thrown their way because of that. But the other, the one more facet of this, again, makes it even more complicated, is you need more cornerbacks than you do pass rushers, right? Right, one elite pass rusher changes the game. But you need cornerback is about your weakest link. Like you need four, you need three corners. You need to go three deep to not have a problem at today's level.

So even if you have a Revis, if the other two guys, either side of him are terrible, it doesn't matter. Like that was Nambeiazamo in Oakland years back. Right. He was never thrown at. They, he saw the ball like 30 times in a season, but the guys in the other side were so bad that it didn't matter. It didn't make any difference because they were just given up

1,500 yards apiece, and teams are still marching the ball down the field. Yeah, this is really interesting. So just, I mean, cutting to the chase on this part of the conversation, would you have taken Okuda if he was the right fit for the system over Chase Young? I honestly don't know. I think you can make a compelling case either way. And this is what, like, there are guys in PFS that are sort of staunchly on either side of the fence on this, and I'm kind of sitting on it saying, look,

I'm willing to be talked around. I'm the GM that's listening to arguments, and ultimately I'm going to flip a coin and decide one way the other. I think personally I would probably lean on Chase Young's certainty, right? The fact that he is so much more likely to be really good than Akuta. If Akuta hits the top 25% of his potential, then he's going to be a more valuable player. But I'm more confident that Chase Young hits that percentage,

so I think I would lean with the confidence. All of that is really interesting. You know, the other part of this real quickly with respect to the dominant pass rusher, and let's just say that Chase Young becomes J.J. Watt, Von Miller off the edge, Kaleel Mack off the edge, that kind of a player for 10 years. You know, what is the sort of incremental win probability? You know, what does he mean to wins above replace? that position right now. I mean, I know you have it behind a corner that's in the right system

and well behind the quarterback, but if Chase Young ends up being an elite pass rusher for the next 10 years, what does it mean to the Redskins? I mean, obviously it helps, and it's an incremental win every step of the way, but it wins above replacing the war. It's so funny because it's basically all the quarterback, and if you don't have a quarterback, again, backing up whatever he thinks anyway. If you don't have a quarterback, you have no shot. Unless you're able to build a roster or a team that is so good that it essentially equals one quarterback. And that's really, really hard to do. It's not impossible, but those teams don't come along very often. And I think it is impossible to sustain that.

Were the 49ers an example of that team last year? I mean, yeah, they were in the ballpark, but I would go a little bit further back and say, you look at that, you know, 2015 Denver Broncos team where Peyton Manning became basically a passenger by the end of it. Like, he was bad in that final year, but the team around him was so good that it didn't matter. And they were able to carry him and Brock Osweiler, you know, for half the time as their quarterback because essentially, you know,

the combined war of everybody they had playing so well around him equaled one good quarterback. But if you have, you know, if Wayne Haskins becomes the next Russell Wilson, or the next, you know, Aaron Rogers, Andrew Luck, whatever top 10, top five quarterback you want to think of, on his own, that equates to the war of like a position upgrade at every other position on the roster. Yeah, I mean, when you mentioned sort of the evaluation of the quarterback and you talked about the bad balls they threw that may not have resulted in a turnover, but that's still a bad ball. Just from watching the 49ers a tonne last year, It seemed like Garoppolo got away with so many horrendous throws during the course of the season.

Am I wrong about that or not? No, you're right. I mean, he definitely had a decent amount of turnover-worthy plays. Garapolos is interesting because he's stylistically, he's on the game manager end of the spectrum. You know, he's a lot like Alex Smith in a lot of ways, except unlike Alex Smith, he makes a lot more of those mistakes. You know, Alex Smith was conservative to a fault where he would always, take care of the ball, but he just wouldn't make enough big plays, right?

So he was the, like, Alex Smith is the prototypical game managing quarterback. But he's also the reason why it became like a pejorative, like a bad thing for your quarterback to be, because he just wouldn't make enough big plays, even though he clearly had the capability of it. Jimmy Garapolo does a lot of the same things, except unlike Alex Smith, he actually makes more of those mistakes. So he's almost, he's a game manager, but has a little bit more volatility to his game as well. So he's a really interesting quarterback because he's a very unusual one to study

stylistically. By the way, because a lot of Redskins fans here, and just going through this recent documentary Project 11 on Alex Smith, I mean, just the realization of how close to death he was and how close he was to losing his leg, you know, look, it doesn't change the football conversation that we've had here in this town about Alex Smith, and it's been a bit of a polarizing conversation. I agree. with you. I mean, first of all, I thought he was having a good game managing season before he got hurt, but they were far from a dynamic passing outfit. It really looked like a bad match between Jay Gruden and what Jay Gruden liked to do and what Alex Smith did well. But I'm just curious as you bring up

sort of that game managing check down, you know, Charlie, you know, quarterback, conservative quarterback. would you, did you evaluate, let's just say, Joe Flacco, you know, in a much more positive sense because he was anything but a checkdown guy and he would throw it into, you know, he would take chances and the ball was stretching the field and the impact that had. And I'm talking about when, you know, he was healthy with an offensive coordinator for more than a year, you know, in Baltimore. Like, is that quarterback more valuable than Garoppolo and Alex Smith? So in a given year, no, but the reason that they become more interesting is because they tend, because they're more volatile, right?

So James Winston is a good example, right? If you look at James Winston versus Alex Smith or whatever game managing quarterback you want to look at, generally speaking, James Winston makes so many big mistakes and so many turnovers, that it doesn't matter that he throws for 5,000 yards and 30-plus touchdowns because he offsets them with the mistakes, right? If you break it down even to just really simple terms, like how many yards does he move the ball per turnover, right, or per big mistake?

And even though James Winston is passing for like a thousand more yards, he's making enough big mistakes that they end up about the same, right? They pass. They move the ball about the same amount down the field for every time they throw it to the defense. So it doesn't actually do you any good that he throws from more of them. But where it becomes interesting is quarterbacks like James, those highly volatile guys, they have a tendency to every now and again you're going to get a season where they don't make as many big mistakes.

And if you take that away, suddenly now you have a Pro Bowl, all-pro caliber quarterback in your hands. And if you think back to Cam Newton in 2015, or Carson Palmer in 2015, there have been a few of these quarterbacks where they've had a season where they've just been able to, for whatever reason, cut down on those turnovers, and now you're like double the amount. Now you're moving the ball twice as far as a guy like Alex Smith for every mistake you're making, and that is what changes the entire conversation.

Because the chance of a game manager ever suddenly developing an aggressive streak are pretty slim, but even just through blind luck, those volatile quarterbacks can just avoid a bunch of mistakes. And when they do that, now they're way more valuable. that's totally logical to me the way you just described that and you could see like Tim I've been a James Winston fan and people you know my listeners said what are you talking about and I'm like look I'm not talking about the 30 interceptions I'm talking about what if he can ever figure out a way not to make that killer mistake and I thought he was well coached last year too you know I think even their coaching staff recognizes you know the potential

somebody like him. If he can figure that out, he could become elite overnight. Yeah, and I think it always spoke volumes to fact that Bruce Ariens didn't want any part of it, right? Because Bruce Ariens was the guy that got that season out of Carson Palmer. He's done this before. He's been the guy that has gotten that season out of the quarterbacks, where you suddenly, you take all the good that was already there, and you have the number of mistakes they're making. You cut down on the bad plays, and suddenly you've got that superstar in your hands. And the fact that Ariens, for a quarterback like James, who was throwing for 5,000 yards,

who still only like, what is he, 26, at 2.27, you know, and the fact that Ariens still looked at that and said, you know what, no, I don't want this, I can't do it. That I think always spoke volume. I thought you were going to say actually something different there. I thought you were going to say that he would perhaps be the guy that figures out with James. how to cut down that turnover ratio in half, but sees the upside.

You know what was interesting, just as an aside on Winston, and I've mentioned this before, is the narrative on him personally was never overly positive, but all you heard during this process of bringing Brady in is how well-respected and how highly thought of he was by his teammates and the coaching staff. It'll be interesting to see what happens with him moving forward. Look, I wanted to get one of the original reasons I called you was this top 1001 list that pro football focus put together and you were a part of. I wanted to start with this. You guys had the top 101 for the 2010s, all right, the last 10 year decade in pro football.

And you ranked the left and you had the left tackles as part of the 101. And you had Trent Williams as the seventh best left tackle or tackle, excuse me, of the decade. That's a wow for most Redskinned fans, Sam, because I think most would say that they thought of Trent Williams as top four to five worst case, if not one of the two or three best of the last decade. Why is he behind Joe Thomas, Jason Peters, Andrew Whitworth, Joe Staley, Tyron Smith, and Dwayne Brown? Yeah, well, I think it's been a really good time for left tackle play. I think that's the first and foremost thing.

The only thing is, you know, a lot of these guys have played, like, the entirety of the decade. Like, Andrew Whitworth has played some of the third number, like, 11,000 snaps in the decade. You know, a lot of these guys have played basically the entire time. And honestly, it was close. Like, these are all really, really good players. And anybody that makes this top 101 list has been a fantastic player over the last decade. So, to a certain extent, you know, we're splitting hairs on this stuff. and ultimately, you know, we lean on the PFF grading.

We have quantified and graded every single play from every one of these guys over the decade. Under Whitworth, we graded 12,000 plays of his or whatever it is. So, you know, those guys just edged him slightly in terms of PFF grade. There's one other player during this last 10 years in Washington that I think had the potential to be on this list when they, the decade ended, but like a lot of players just could never stay healthy enough. What did you guys think of Jordan Reed's potential in the two or three years of high-level production at that position? Yeah, I mean, at his best, like you say, when he's been healthy, he has had a PFF grade

that's right up there with the best receiving tight ends in the NFL. You know, Rob Gruncowski over the decade kind of skews what everybody thinks of a tight end because he just broke the mold. He was the best tight end in the NFL, and he was the most complete tight end in the NFL. He was the best receiving weapon at the position, but he was also probably the best blocking tight end in the decade as well. There are guys that had roster spots for years as blocking specialists, and Grancashis was better than them at blocking. So he breaks everything, but generally over the decade, tight ends have been either receivers or they've been blockers. And Jordan Reed, at his best, I think, has been as good as,

any non-Gronkowski receiving tight end in the NFL, we just didn't get to see enough of it. I think you're right. If he had been 100% healthy for his entire career, we would be thinking of him as, you know, one of the

best players of the decade, and one of the best tight ends of his era. The quarterbacks for the 2010s were ranked in order. Brady, Breeze, Rogers, Peyton, Matt Ryan, Russell Wilson, Rathlisberger, and Rivers. They were the quarterbacks ranked in the top 101.

I think if we, as football fans, think of the best quarterbacks of the last 10 years, you know, that's the list of quarterbacks that you would definitely have in there. Who was next? Who was next? Next I think would have been Andrew Luck, right? That makes sense. And you didn't have Cam in there. No.

So PFS has always been way lower on Cam than everybody else, with the exception of that one 2015 season, where he put it all together and became an MVP caliber player. If he'd been that player for his entire career, you know, he would be on this list. He would be, we'd be where everybody else is. And I think people have always kind of used the upside, the highlight, the positive plays. You know, the same way that right now everybody skews negative on James Winston. It's like, I don't care about the 5,000 yards because there's so many interceptions. I think people have always skewed the other way to an extent with Cam Newton.

It's like, wow, look at these throws, you know, look at this laser 50 yards down field, look at this throw off balance from the pocket, look at the dominant physical skills he has running the ball. It's like, yeah, but there's a lot of bad plays in there as well, and what matters is, like the sum of all that, right? When you put it all together, where do you end up? and I think Camas always ended up a little bit lower using PSF measurements than everybody else thinks he has other than that one great season. Yeah, it makes sense to me that luck would have been sort of in-ne-ne Stafford maybe. Yeah, luck and Stafford, I think, will probably be the next two quarterbacks up.

So last question for you, because you've been so generous with your time. It started with you telling me that you lived in the States for a while in Minnesota. Soda. So how does PFF evaluate Kirk Cousins? Last season, pretty well. I think last season was a career year for him. Cousins is another one of these players. It's really intriguing because he's an unusual skill set. He's an unusual sort of unusual breakup of quarterback. You know, the same way Jimmy Gropolo is a very unusual quarterback stylistically. I think Cousins is as well. because he does a lot of things really well,

and then there's always a little bit missing. And ultimately, the Vikings are in this interesting position where they roll the dice with this contract a couple of times now. It's sort of fully guaranteed high-end money, and it's not that it's the most owner's contract in the NFL, but it's certainly onerous enough that it causes them problems. You know, and they have to constantly juggle their ability to spend money on other positions.

And I think Cousins is maybe the best of the quarterbacks that are in this tier that need, you know, help around them. There's guys like Patrick Mahomes that are transcendent talents, and it almost doesn't matter what you put around them because they can drag anything to the playoffs and do enough in the playoffs to win games, you know, regardless of their supporting cast. Right. Aaron Rogers, Russell Wilson, who else is in that category right now today in the league? right now, it might only, I don't know if Rogers is still in there, to be honest,

it might only be Russell Wilson and Patrick Mahomes right at the second. And even Mahomes, you know, he's got a great situation right now. So I don't want to, you know, lean too heavily on that. I just think that him, Russell Wilson, those guys, it almost doesn't matter what you put around them. They would be good. But then you have this group of quarterbacks where, you know, if you surround them with enough talent, they can win you games. And Cousins was brought over to Minnesota.

because of games like the 2017 N.S.C. championship game, right? Things went south against the Eagles. They got in a big hole in a hurry. And Case Canem or Sam Bradford or Teddy Bridgewater, those guys were not the quarterbacks that can bring you back from a big deficit with their throwing. They're just not that kind of style. Cousins at least can do that.

He doesn't do it consistently, and he's not you know, he's not a Patrick Mahomes, right? You can't give him a 10-point deficit every game and expect him to just keep going. But he at least has that skill set. He's got the ability to do that. And the Vikings essentially brought him in with that in mind. But the problem is, in order for that to work, you need to be able to maintain a 2017-caliber roster around him. And the amount they're paying him is so much that they're really struggling to do that right now. Yeah, I mean, that's interesting that you wouldn't have Rogers in that group

that you can strap basically the team to his back, a subpar, or an average team, and he can get you to the postseason and win a game or two? I mean, he obviously was in that group at some point, but you think he's fallen out of that group. Yeah, and I think he can certainly still get you to the postseason and maybe win a game, but I think we've seen that he's not, like, he can't take you all the way anymore without some more help. I think the past few seasons have probably shown that, right?

is we've been wondering what's wrong with this Green Bay offense or with Aaron Rogers, and Mike McCarthy initially took all the blame, and then last season, the new coaching staff comes in, and it's the same story. So now it's shifted a little more to, well, maybe it is Rogers. And, you know, they've, and if the only mitigating factor to that would be, well, he's only had Devante Adams, and he hasn't had this great group of receivers. But that's, you know, that's exactly what we're talking about, right? it said in the past, it might not have mattered if it was only Devonthe Adams and a bunch of other guys.

Rogers is so good, he would overcome that. Now it's at least impacting him to the point where we're saying, well, Rogers might not be the same guy anymore. Interesting stuff. This has been great. Actually, you know what I lied. Do you evaluate coaches and coaching staffs? Does PFF do that or not? We do, sort of.

So we were just talking about this in our podcast that I really like the way we do it, right? because it assumes less sort of knowledge and less right and wrong than other places. Like if you were going to grade coaches, most people want you to grade the play call and sort of look at this and say, well, that was a bad play call. Let's give that a negative grade. That was a great one. Let's give that a positive. But ultimately, there's too many moving pieces.

You need to know too much to do that. And it's very difficult to figure out a way you would do that without sort of basically just relying on the result, whether it worked or not. but that's not necessarily a good play call. So what PFF does is say, well, at our heart, we were a player evaluation website. So we wanted to know how good each individual player was playing versus, you know, just their box score stats or their perception.

And we've been, there's always been a little bit of a disconnect between, you know, the sum of those parts and how a unit is actually performing. So, you know, adding up the grades of 11 guys on defense doesn't necessarily give you an accurate reflection of how well, that defense is playing because it's about how it all ties together. Sure. And I think the difference between those two, if you look at the, you know, the correct ways of measuring sort of efficiency and production of a unit, offensive defense, and then compare

that to their PFF grade, the difference between those two is effectively coaching and scheme, right? So if you've got a bunch of guys that are grading terribly but their defense collectively is doing really well, well, that means the scheme and the coaching is doing a really good job because it's making, you know, a really good job out of a bunch of guys that aren't playing that well. Similarly, if the reverse is true, you've got a bunch of guys who are all grading out of their skins, but the defense is still getting destroyed. I mean, that means the coaching in the scheme is terrible.

Right. So we do that, essentially, for both sides of the ball and compare, you know, the difference, the difference between PFF grade for the unit and how they're actually performing overall. And I think it's really interesting because it does push up guys that are consistently able to beat one side or other of that, you know, of that difference. Right. You see guys consistently do make a difference, either positively or negatively. What did the Redskins get with Ron Rivera and his staff?

I think they've got a guy that will overachieve a little bit, certainly on defense. I think Ron Rivera, like, he's not among the very best coaches in the NFL for that in terms of consistent, proven track record of elevating a group. But I think he does, like, he does tend to get more out of the group and the sort of some of their talent, some of their grading. So I think for defense in particular, they've gotten a good coach. I really appreciate this. This was really beyond what I had anticipated when I called you.

It was great, Sam. Really appreciate it for those that want to follow Sam on Twitter at PFF underscore Sam. Really appreciate it, Sam. Enjoy the rest of the weekend. Stay healthy, and hopefully we'll talk soon. Anytime. Thanks for having me. That was great. I really enjoyed that conversation with Sam Monson. I loved his backstory. I've been skeptical of PFF for many years now. They're obviously getting better than where they were a few years back. But he really had some interesting information and was really good in conversation there. I hope you enjoyed it as well. By the way, I didn't mention this on Trent Williams, where he landed on the 101.1. player list. He was 59th, and he was the seventh best tackle per pro football focus of the 2010s.

Six tackles in front of him, and I think I mentioned them, but they were Joe Thomas, Jason Peters, Andrew Whitworth, Joe Staley, Tyron Smith, and Dwayne Brown, all rated as better tackles ahead of Trump Williams. But you heard what Sam said that it was, you know, very close. And Trent Williams ended up being the 59th best player of the decade and the seventh best tackle of the decade. I enjoyed that conversation. I hope you did as well. All right. We're done for today. It's doubtful unless there's a major story that we will do a show on Memorial Day. So the next time you'll hear from us will be Tuesday. If there is a podcast, it's because something dramatic happened here over the next remaining days of the weekend. Have a great holiday weekend.

Stay healthy, stay safe. Talk to you on Tuesday.