ESPN Introduced A New Rating System For College Football Players That Looks A ‘Madden’ Score, Here’s How It’s Calculated

The 2019 College Football season kicks off on August 24th when the Florida Gators face the Miami Hurricanes on neutral ground in Orlando, Florida. The two historically great programs from the Sunshine State rarely face each other because Florida pretty much refuses to play non-SEC FBS opponents other than FSU, so this will be a particularly fun in-state rivalry to kick off the season.

Ahead of this weekend’s game between UF and UM, ESPN has unveiled a new video game-style rating for college football players that looks very similar to something you’d see in Madden or other sports games, with players receiving a score from 1-to-100. It’s called the ‘PlayStation Player Impact Rating’ and ESPN is emphasizing that this is a true 1-to-100 scale with ‘plenty of 11s out there’ but that’s not what the people want to know, they’re interested in the 99s.

They applied this new rating scale to players in 2018 and what they found is Tua Tagovailoa and Kyler Murray were both rated 99/100, Alabama WR Jerry Jeudy was a 99, Georgia’s OT Isaiah Wilson was a 99, Clemson OG Gage Cervenka was rated 99/100, and many others were rated in the 95-98 region.

How is ESPN calculating the new PlayStation Player Impact Rating new metric that I’m sure we’re all going to see nonstop all season long during games? They released a short and long explanation in an article on ESPN from Paul Sabin & Seth Walder, here’s the short version with the longer explanation below:

While no human can watch every single player on every single snap every single week and objectively rate them all, a mathematical model built by ESPN Sports Analytics can.

We’ve got a full explanation below, but the abridged version is this: For every player, we compare his team’s performance when he’s on the field vs. when he’s off it, and then we adjust for the skill of his teammates and opponents on every snap and consider whether each play was a run or a pass.

Think of it as real plus-minus, scaled 0-100, just for football.

To be clear, there are no traditional statistics built into our new rating. It quite simply tries to measure the effect of each player on every play. The advantage of this approach is that less obvious impacts from players — a lockdown cornerback’s presence on the field allows a safety to drift toward the box and augment the run stop — can be captured by the model. (via)

Players are only compared against their position, not against every other player in the game. This new model measures each player’s effect on every play and in certain instances, this can be much harder to quantify because the existence of one badass player on the field might enable another player to perform better alongside them.

I thought I’d throw out a few more player ratings from last season: Clemson’s quarterback Trevor Lawrence was a 95, West Virginia’s Will Grier was a 95, and so was Zac Thomas from Appalachian State…Not exactly a team name you see too often when you’re talking about the best players in the game.

ESPN included a much longer explanation in their article of how the new PlayStation Player Impact Rating is calculated for every player. You can read that in full detail here, but for now here are some of the more important parts:

In Division I college football there were about 4.5 scores (TD and FG) per team each game the last couple of years compared to roughly 50 in the NBA (FGM and FTM). A “plus-minus” based metric requires lots of scoring for proper evaluation.

To compensate for that we use a metric called expected points added (EPA), which assigns a point value to the change in field position a team makes each play in conjunction with the down and distance. Essentially, EPA knows that a 5-yard completion on third-and-3 is good, and a 5-yard completion on third-and-8 is not as good.

With EPA established, we need to know who is on the field and off the field on each play. Armed with that information, the Bayesian hierarchical statistical model then estimates the value of each player based on the EPA when he is on the field vs. when he is not, adjusting for the skill of other 21 players sharing the field on each play.

This part is just like ESPN’s real plus-minus, though we can’t stop there due to some differences between basketball and football. (via)

I can’t get past the PlayStation branding of this stat. They basically decided they want to create a video game metric for a video game company, using college football players who would LOVE to be in a video game, but those players aren’t getting paid for this branding that’s using their name. If you were to see your name next to this in a promotion ‘John Smith’s PlayStation Player Impact Rating of 69’ wouldn’t it be pretty obvious that your name was being used to pump PlayStation? Wouldn’t you feel used?

Maybe I’m just tired of this ‘pay the athletes’ argument because there’s no logical reason they shouldn’t be getting paid already and this just feels like they’re pouring salt in the wounds by putting a brand name on every player.

Here are some more aspects of this new model:

One important feature to this model that is unique to our approach is allowing the model to determine how much importance each position holds by measuring the variance of player impact across all players with a common position.
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Once every player’s adjusted plus minus per play is established, we translate that number into a 0-100 rating relative to other players’ adjusted plus-minus at the same position. That 0-100 number is the PlayStation Player Impact Rating. (via)

They explain that top QBs in the NCAA have higher ratings not because they individually impact the game more than other players but because there is a much wider spread in impact amongst quarterbacks versus a position like Tight End where the spread in impact is much smaller.

The model also accounts for the difference in impact between run and pass plays with pass plays being more valuable than runs, in general.

You might as well just click here to visit ESPN for the full explanation because we’re all going to sed this on TV for the rest of our lives and we might as well familiarize ourselves with it now. They’ve also got more listings of player ratings from last season at each position for you to read through.