These "grades" kill me. Is some asshat watching film and assigning some very specific grade to a way a guy is blocking?
"Fred, you got this guy at a 71.2, but what I see is a 77.89! You are underrating him!"
In truth, the grades reflect cumulative averages. Knowing the the actual number of snaps for each “block” would allow some context. Knowing the grading criteria would also help. Is it a “Plus” or “Minus” for each snap? Do you get partial credit for, say, good footwork even though you weren’t able to lock up your guy or got called for holding?
We always used Plus/Minus and a bunch of the college guys at clinics and breakout groups used similar grading, but I don’t know how much the increased analytics might have added more criteria to be considered, having been out of the coaching and clinics for several years.
One funny story about grades and how they can be manipulated…we had a secondary guy who fancied himself a hard @ss when grading his DBs and we lost a tough defensive struggle in our first game 7-3 (missed two FGs that would have won it). On Sunday when we met, we all had to give a synopsis of our group and their grades. Most of us were tough but fair, acknowledging a need for improvement. Mr. DB Hard@ss graded all but one of his starters as “F” (below 70%) in a ham-handed attempt to one up the rest of us and maybe somehow curry favor with the HC. No bueno. The HC’s comment was “You mean to tell me that we were playing with three failures in the secondary at any given time during the game? Hell, that means we were essentially playing the game with one DB! That shti ain’t gonna cut it!” We rode his @ss for the next week like Gus and Woodrow did Jake Spoon. His DBs never graded “F” again and we were spared further virtue signaling (even though that wasn’t a thing back then
).