Sunday Night Football continued with PFF grades despite receiving criticism from Pat McAfee, JJ Watt, Chris Long, and others as fans point finger at Cris Collinsworth
22:28 ET, 19 Oct 2025Updated 22:31 ET, 19 Oct 2025
Cris Collinsworth
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Cris Collinsworth joined SNF full-time in 2009(Image: Getty Images)
Despite facing criticism from around the NFL world midweek, the Sunday Night Football broadcast of Atlanta Falcons vs the Brock Purdy-less San Francisco 49ers on NBC showed PFF grades for offensive and defensive players when the lineups were announced.
Pat McAfee was one of the loudest critics, and he took to X to poke fun at NBC's decision and fan the flames of outraged fans. McAfee tweeted the "I'm not f------ leaving" from the 'Wolf of Wall Street' with Leonardo DiCaprio.
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Sunday Night Football commentator Cris Collinsworth, known for staunchly defending his own opinions, bought a stake in PFF back in 2014. The company was originally founded by Neil Hornsby in the United Kingdom back in 2004 and provides stats, analysis, and grades both on the NFL and college football.
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Fans were quick to blame Collinsworth for keeping the grades around. "Sunday night Collinsworth," one wrote. "Pretty sure it's in Collinsworth's contract," another said. "PFF rated deez nuts a 1 out of 32," a different joked.
"Dudes having his moment telling you about his high school and all I can think is, 'Damn this ** is 79 out of 157," one tweeted.
Former first overall pick Chris Long started the discourse on his podcast. "Get Mahomes quarterback 13 of 32 off my television screen," he joked. “We’re talking about legislation, what our kids shouldn’t see at school, what they shouldn’t be learning about, should we have political ads on television. I want the PFF scores off the TV as bad as I want political ads off the television.”
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Former NFL Defensive Player of the Year JJ Watt was on 'The Pat McAfee' show the next day to weigh in. “PFF has a lot of very beneficial tools," he started. “The number one issue with PFF by far, bar none, hands down is their player grading system and the fact that they project it everywhere, including nationally televised games on Sunday night, where everybody’s watching. And they make it underneath the rankings, where it states as fact ’91st out of 97th defensive tackles.’… that is a completely made-up number.”
Collinsworth was broached on the topic by Kay Adams on Thursday. “Thanks for the attention. You’re helping our sales,” he joked to the FanDuel TV host. The NBC man defended his product. “It’s sort of ironic that we’ve had other coaches who have complained much louder to me about this, right?" he asked.
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"Those guys would call me and I would say, ‘coach, come on in. Meet my guys, look at our system, pick it apart, do anything you want. Just take a look at the whole thing.’ Of those coaches, one of them asked for and did buy into our company. One of them asked to buy into our company and said he couldn’t afford it. And another one endorsed cutting a player based on PFF grades."
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"So a lot of people have their own opinions, you know, we grade things, we evaluate things. We’ve spent literally tens of millions of dollars trying to perfect this system.”
Collinsworth was named the main NBC Sunday Night Football color commentator in 2009 following the retirement of John Madden.