The good people at Pro Football Focus spend enormous amounts of time breaking down every player’s performance on every individual play throughout the season. In the end, players can then be given a final rating somewhere between zero (poor) and 100 (elite). If you want to learn more about their methodology, you can read PFF’s Player Grade overview.
What I have always appreciated about PFF is that while no player evaluation system is perfect, at least PFF is consistent. Players are graded by the same criteria which enables them to be given one of seven grades based on their rating and position rank:
- Elite
- High Quality
- Good
- Above Average
- Average
- Below Average
- Poor
Based on free, public information available at PFF’s Carolina Panthers page after Week 17, here are the final 2018 ratings, grades, and position rankings for each of the Panthers starters and regular contributors on defense.